Recent discourse of the transnational or postnational mark a critical shift in the figuration of identities and of global geopolitical realities. Multinational capital, diasporas, migration, tourism, the Internet, the global dissemination of popular culture, and the global assembly line index these transformations and have increasingly compelled the attention of cultural critics.
Such shifts lead us to rethink categories of identity such as “nation,” loosing them from their foundational moorings without jettisoning the categories themselves, for the very appearance of foundational certainty gives them weight in the world. Indeed, nationalism and transnationalism can operate dialectically, as mutually interdependent discourses.
Concerns with the national and transnational have been refrains in Japan of late, taking the form in the 1980s of a preoccupation with Japanese identity and internationalization. Japan’s historical positioning fostered assertions of a new Japanese confidence and a burgeoning nationalism commensurate with Japan’s status as an economic superpower, a “Japan that can say no” (Ishihara 1991).
In the Japanese case the popularity of so-called kokusaika (internationalization) ideology in the 1980s is arguably of a piece with the rise of neonationalism. Internationalization in fact results in the reinscription of what is called Nihonjinron, “the master narrative celebrating Japanese uniqueness” (Yoshimoto 22), in which an ineffable Japanese essence inaccessible to foreigners grounds claims to Japanese economic and political superiority.
In this essay I examine the complex interweavings of nationalismltransnationalism with the forces of class and especially gender, in two sites that at first glance seem strikingly disparate: a Comme des Garçons ad campaign for a domestic line of menswear, called “the Japanese Suit,” and the literature on transnationalismldiaspora as exemplified in the work of two pivotal male theorists in the field, Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai.
Carefully attending to the specificity of each site, we will find gender and class to be always already implicated in the nation and the transnational, in which both the Japanese ads and the texts of social theory provide materials for fabricating class-bound masculinities.
Holding together for a moment these two different sites may give us cause for productive reflection on the interconnections among the forces I describe, including perhaps unexpected resonances between the world offashion and the world of academe.
Within our regime of commodity capitalism, it is hardly surprising to find powerful articulations of identity in a domain whose business is the figuration of idealized objects of desire: advertising. Designed specifically to promote identification and provoke object lust, consciously deploying techniques to pull on issues resonant for their audience, ads-particularly fashion ads-become privileged sites for the examination of subject formation.
In the Japanese Suit ad campaign, avant-garde design house Comme des Garçons strikingly articulates the contradictions in contemporary Japanese identity. It is equally fitting that subject formation and the imbrications of masculinity with nationalism, race, and class would be so eloquently elaborated in a campaign for men’s suits.
Anne Hollander outlines their development in the West, primarily in Britain and France. She argues that the classic Greek nude provided the model for the idealized masculine figure enshrined in what we now know as the suit.
Garments became sites where social transformations appeared in material form; for example, at the turn of the nineteenth century, men’s garments and the masculine ideal shifted from “courtly refinement to natural simplicity” (90), as their form changed from aristocratic finery to a more sober silhouette incorporating motifs from multiple sources variously marked with respect to class, including the garments of the French sans-culottes and the wardrobe of English country gentlemen.
Hollander vividly details the complexities of subject formation the suit reveals: The modem masculine image was thus virtually in place by 1820, and it has been only slightly modified since. The modern suit has provided so perfect a visualization of modern male pride that it has so far not needed replacement, and it has gradually provided the standard costume of civil leadership for the whole world.
The masculine suit now suggests probity and restraint, prudence and detachment; but under these enlightened virtues also seethe its hunting, laboring, and revolutionary origins; and therefore the suit still remains sexually potent and more than a little menacing … one true mirror of modern male selfesteem (55).
Suits thus provide an exemplary site for our examination of the interweavings of aesthetics, politics, class, nation, sexuality, and masculinity. I first came across the ads for the Japanese suit as a relatively minor part of my study on Japanese fashion. “Homme Deux,” the line of domestic menswear promoted in the Japanese suit campaign, is one of the many ancillary lines that bear the Comme des Garçons label.
These are secondary in both ideological and financial terms to the high-fashion labels “Comme des Garçons” for women and “Homme Plus” for men. Looking through clippings at the Comme des Garçons office one muggy August afternoon in Tokyo, I came across a striking ad, bold black characters arrayed on a stark white background. Reading it, I was stunned-both seduced and compelled to read on.
THE JAPANESE SUIT COMME DES GARCONS HOMME DEUX IS CLOTHING FOR THE JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN OF THE FUTURE. IT IS THE CLOTHING FOR THE SPIRITUAL ELITE, WHO LIVE AS PART OF A HARMONIOUS WHOLE, YET STILL POSSESS A CLEARLY DEFINED INDIVIDUALITY BASED ON INNER REFINEMENT.
WAKON YOSAI (JAPANESE SPIRIT AND WESTERN KNOWLEDGE) expressed the Meiji4 man’s way of life. It means living by the Japanese spirit while flexibly assimilating Western civilization. Created in 1978, Comme des Garçons Homme is clothing designed to keep alive the Meiji spirit and aesthetic sensibility, carrying it into the present.
This clothing appealed to the young who have no inferiority complex vis-a.-vis the West. The campaign intricately, boldly interweaves history, nationhood, and masculinity through its invocation of a Japanese aesthetic sensibility, a Japanese masculine body and Japan’s present historical position in the world. This figuration of Japan ultimately culminates in the need for a particularly Japanese suit.
These ads directly confront geopolitical histories of defeat and “inferiority” symbolized by the “demasculinization” and de-eroticizing of Japanese men. They eloquently write the complexity of Japan’s positioning at a transitional historical moment: the dilemmas facing a First-World, capitalist power with an imperialist history and thinly veiled neoimperialist ambitions that is nonetheless racially marked and Orientalized.
Comme des Garçons mobilizes and amplifies the circulating discourses of Nihonjinron, Orientalism, internationalism, and neonationalism that thrust into the foreground the constitutive contradictions animating Japanese identity. Given a history of penetration by the West and continuing racism in Japan-U.S. interactions, the problematic invocation of Nihonjinron simultaneously becomes an intervention in various Orientalisms that constitute and unravel the East/West binary, eloquent testimony to the salience of racial marking in the fields of global geopolitics.
In so doing, the ads deploy strategies that are premised on the creation of consumer-subjects, the provocation of neoimperialist and nationalist nostalgias, the gendering of abjection as feminine, elitist class distinctions, and the reinscription of highly problematic or even dangerous essentialisms. Yet given an Asian American subject position, the ad copy can also stir deep feelings about Japanese American/Asian American/Asian bodies, highlighting the importance of clothing as a medium for fashioning gendered, raced identities.
In its skillful mobilization of history, politics, and the geopolitical histories of specific bodies, “The Japanese Suit” campaign serves as a point of entry into gender, race, nation, the transnational, in which the tensions between nationalism and transnationalism are materially embodied in its figuration of masculine subjects.
Homme Deux and “The Japanese Suit” The Comme des Garçons Homme Deux line is aimed at a tough, competitive domestic market for business suits that would seem to be initially resistant to inroads from high-fashion companies. Homme Deux possesses several distinc- 160 tive features.
First, it combines a conservative look with elements that are unconventional in a Japanese work setting stereotypically known for its singlebreasted navy blue suits and white shirts. To a Western eye, they are not recognizably high style. Aside from a slightly looser fit, a soft shoulder, and no back vents, they are not visibly different from any other tasteful, nicely tailored, rather conservative business suit.
However, the lone photograph of a suit in the campaign, featured in an in-house brochure, shows a double-breasted jacket: a challenge to convention, since double-breasted jackets are not quite comme ilfaut in a Japanese corporate setting.
Second, Homme Deux is aimed at an older, more conservative market than is Homme Plus; alternatively, it can ‘be worn by Homme Plus devotees of any age who might need to dress more conservatively at the workplace but who still want the Comme des Garçons cachet.
Third, the Homme Deux advertising campaign is unprecedented in Comme des Garçons history both in terms of placement of the ads and the design of the ads themselves: the extensive use of text7 and the adroit, aggressive use of the thematics of gender, race and nation. The campaigns clearly aim for name recognition and market share in this untapped market for high style.
How different is this campaign from the Comme des Garçons approach to its primary lines? For its high fashion lines, the firm rarely advertises in fashion magazines. If ads are placed at all, they might appear in Ariforum or BAM, but almost never in Vogue.
In 1988 Comme des Garçons developed an image book distributed to the fashion press and to customers, a practice shared by other artistic design houses such as Yohji Yamamoto and Romeo Gigli. Here, the emphasis on the allusive and the oblique is pushed to an extreme. “Art” rather than “mere advertising,” the image books encode the message that Comme des Garçons is about more than just clothes.
In contrast, the Homme Deux campaign is striking in its direct approach. Comme des Garçons has targeted its market and advertises in the equivalents of The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Fortune (e.g., Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business). Even more fascinating, they have developed a strategy to direct advertising at women, capitalizing on the tendency of women to buy clothing for their husbands and sons.
Ad copy shows well-known women as commentators on men’s style, and these ads appear in the venerable Katei Gaho, a large-format glossy women’s magazine that represents the epitome of upscale feminine respectability.
In choosing to enter the highly competitive domestic market for men’s suits, Comme des Garçons is faced with the problem of convincing Japanese men to attend more carefully to the aesthetics of appearance at the workplace. Thus, the thematics of the campaign are crucial. Having strategically targeted the venues that will reach businessmen, what better way for Comme des Garçons to pique their interest than to link clothing choice to the resonant, weighty matters of nationalism, politics, history, and masculinity?
Let us return to the rest of the ad:
Since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, THE WORLD OF MEN’S CLOTHING possesses a history in which the world’s economic and cultural leader sets world style. Isn’t the timing right for Japan, now said to be a world economic power, to set forth its own distinctive style of menswear?
Now… what might be the basis for this uniquely Japanese aesthetic awareness and Japanese way of living? THE AESTHETIC SENSE OF SHIBUI (tasteful, quiet elegance) is the answer. Like the stylish flair of a man wearing a pongee kimono. This sensibility is sustained by a fundamentally Japanese aesthetic awareness and feeling for life that downplays surface showiness, concealing and refining individuality deeply within.
The notion of bankara (rustic, unconventional dress) that once thrived among the students of the old high school system, is one of these expressions of shibui. JAPAN is now moving and shaking IN THE WORLD. It is squarely facing numerous problems: the recession caused by the appreciation of the yen, the growth of domestic demand, the opening of markets, the limitation of exports.
Perhaps there has never before been a time when we have felt so strongly that, through economics, we live as individuals within a larger world, in a Japan that is globally interconnected. What is needed in this new world are the sense of judgment and the decision-making power to clearly set forth your point of view by choosing wisely from the flood of available information.
COMME DES GARCONS HOMME DEUX is businesswear for this historical era. Clothing that is easy to wear, tastefully elegant, not restrictive to the body. As “preppie” clothing represented the Ivy Leaguer of the American East Coast, this is the new businesswear based on the aesthetic sensibility of Japan’s business elite.
The suit here becomes a site for the play of geopolitical relations between Japan and the West. The ad copy calls on the suit as a material emblem of Japanese conformity and racial inferiority. Derisive jokes both within and outside Japan about Organization Men in their stodgy navy blue jackets pointedly satirize the restrictive conventions of the male business world. Historically, suits have resonated deeply with the feelings of discomfort some Japanese have felt vis-a-vis Europe and the United States.
One recalls Natsume Soseki, the celebrated Meiji period author, who writes with considerable pathos of his sojourn in London. His feelings of inferiority were embodied in his sense of looking out-of-place and ill-at-ease in Western clothing. In a searing anecdote, Soseki tells us that as he walked down the street in a frock coat and top hat, two working men derisively called out “a handsome Jap!”s Here, the attempt to fit into British society through adopting the proper outward accoutrements of Westernness-the frock coat and top hat-cannot disguise Soseki’s racial markings.
Comme des Garçons skillfully plays upon this history of conformity, discomfort, and inferiority. Of course, the conditions for perceived inferiority have undergone major transformations since the Meiji period. The Japan of the 1980s was economically powerful, increasingly confident, and, in many quarters, increasingly exasperated at U.S. assertions of dominance in arenas such as the ongoing trade negotiations.
The dilemma of the 1980s was not one of playing catch-up, since in many economic fields Japan had assumed a position of eminence, if not preeminence. Rather, it involved combatting racism and perceived unfairness, attempts to deal with the anger that American and European assumptions of superiority provoked.
The ads write this dilemma: how should Japan address a complex situation of historical inferiority, shifting economic and geopolitical balances, domestic confidence, and U.S’/European fear, racism, and condescension? In writing this problem they also propose the means for its resolution: the Japanese Suit. The campaign’s catchphrase Nihon no sebiro engages the complexities of the changing dynamic between Japan and the West. Foregoing the more contemporary word slltsu, Comme des Garçons selected the nostalgic term sebiro, from the English “Savile Row,” a testament to British hegemony as world power and world trendsetter in the late nineteenth century.
But it is not just any sebiro Comme des Garçons invokes, it is a Japanese sebiro. Japan has appropriated and made its own a genre of clothing originally defined as quintessentially British. Clad in such a suit, no longer will Japanese men feel out-of-place or inferior.
The ad copy allows readers and consumers to participate in a nostalgia for the glories of empire, both British and Japanese, giving implicit license to neoimperialist fantasies in which Japan displaces Britain. Indeed, say the ads, style is set by world powers, and Japan has finally joined those ranks, suggesting that Japan is Britain’s proper heir.
Further, the ads deploy script styles and word choice as essentializing practices that write an ambivalent and complexly positioned Japanese identity. Take, for example, the use of loan words. It is no accident that they are primarily from English, given a constitutive history of occupation and penetration.
The use of loan words indexes that relationship of historical inferiority and defeat. On the other hand, English terms have been appropriated in ways that render them Japanese. Significantly, sebiro is written in characters that mean “back” and “broad.”
More common for foreign loan words is the use of the katakana syllabary that marks the terms as foreign; the many other English loan words sprinkled throughout the ad are rendered in the usual katakana: bizinesuea (“business wear”), toraddo (“traditional or preppie”), bodeishieipu (“body shape”), apiru (“appeal”).
And of course there is the Japanicized French of the company name itself, indexing the history of French dominance in the fashion world. The liberal use of loan words endows the piece with cosmopolitan cachet, as it both gestures toward the West as center and indexes the Japanese appropriation of the West.
Yet, the piece carefully retains the essence of Japanese identity in its invocation of shibui (adjective) or of shibusa (noun) in Japanese characters, allowing subtle understatement to remain the distinctive feature of Japanese culture and aesthetics. Thus, the use of script and effective choice of terms gives us a Japan flexible enough to assimilate and appropriate the West, in a resynthesized identity that asserts an essential Japaneseness based in the culture of shibusa, a term that itself possesses eloquent double meanings.
Among younger people, shibui signifies “hip,” “cool.” Consequently, shibui as the essence of Japanese identity temporarily resolves the tradition/modernity binary, evoking both a history of subtle aestheticism and the vibrantly contemporary. The subject-position created here is at one level oppositional to certain kinds of Orientalist discourses.
In combatting the Orientalist stereotype of the businessman as the corporate drone as well as domestic critiques of the conservatism and lack of creativity of the Organization Man, the campaign asserts a creative assimilation of the West that contests narratives of Western preeminence or Japanese imitativeness and, arguably, undermines the East/West binary.
Indeed, the ad challenges stereotypes of Japanese conformity by invoking a particularly Japanese individuality imbued with shibusa. Both refined and hip, the businessman who will wear Nihon no sebiro is his own man. He is neither a conformist in a cheap navy blue suit and white shirt nor a wild radical incapable of getting along with others in society.
His personality, his unique dispositions, are ineffably present but visible only in elegant, tasteful-yet contemporary-form. The foundation for this unique synthesis is located in the cultural essence of shibusa. Thus, at one level the ads take on Orientalist stereotypes, while at another level engaging a self-Orientalizing that remscribes a nationalist essence based in racial difference.
The contradictions of Japanese identity at this transitional historical juncture thus permeate the text: racially marked and Orientalized on the one hand, a First-World power with neoimperialist ambitions on the other. The campaign highlights subtextually a history of various forms of domination by the Westthe opening and penetration of Japan by Commodore Perry, defeat in World War II and the subsequent Occupation and foreign intrusion into the national body, the continuing dominance of American and European popular culture.
The businessman is located within this history. The would-be consumer of Nihon no sebiro is a cosmopolitan man of erudition, as the frequent use of loan words would suggest. The ad also writes the potential consumer as the class equivalent of an Ivy Leaguer, possessing both the financial and cultural capital to be part of the business and government power elites in Japan.
But he is also someone of a vintage who must remember the humiliations of the war and who yearns to be free of feelings of inferiority toward the West. The Japanese suit promises to fulfill this yearning, giving the consumer the material means by which he can assume leadership on a par with the men of Meiji and the confidence of today’s cosmopolitan young people.
The ad campaign writes a particular subject of desire, who can satisfy that desire and create a satisfying Japanese masculinity by purchasing a Japanese Suit. The Homme Deux ads weave a compelling, skillfully constructed narrative that is, simultaneously, profoundly gendered. Japan’s history of defeat and the Orientalizing and racializing of the body are implicitly associated with femininity.
Feminized and Orientalized in his relations to the West, the businessman is given an opportunity to construct a fully masculine identity that would necessarily involve righting former geopolitical imbalances, embracing a masculinity based on strength, leadership, individuality, intelligence. This masculinity becomes the figure defined against the ground of a passive femininity defined as defeat, penetration, and subjection to domination.
Becoming fully a man, then, will require dominance-a dominance attainable in a Japanese Suit. Precisely this issue reveals the fissures in this stirring narrative. Invoking the Meiji period highlights a revolutionary moment of nation-building in Japan, a massive mobilization in response to Western challenges.
But along with nation-state formation came imperialist ambitions, and the advertisements’ focus on Meiji nation-building elides other imperial and colonial histories, including the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the colonization of Korea and Taiwan, and the processes of militarization that brought Japan to the Pacific War.
In the ads, parity is conceived only in terms of Japan’s relation to the West. But the tacit message is that dominance can also evoke fantasies of Japanese empire as Japan takes over Britain’s imperial mantle. The man who wears a Japanese suit then will truly stand as Britain’s heir.
In making such bold appeals to gendered nationalisms, Comme des Garçons is attempting to address the daunting task of differentiating its product within a highly competitive market. The following sections analyze three other phases of the campaign, three related strategies the company pursues in order to capitalize on its high-fashion cachet for a diffident, conservative consumer who may consider fashion a trivial female concern.
One series involves testimonials from well-known critics, authors, and technological experts, who thematize the links between a satisfying Japanese male identity and the world of style. Not only is it permissible for men to care about clothing, but such care is synonymous with masculinity and worldly success. One critic tells a sad tale of going to America in the immediate postWorld War II period, where he suffered discrimination as a Japanese. Defeat and poverty left him poorly dressed, and he suffered further humiliation for his out-of-date garments.
The vignette ends with his acquisition of a fashionable American suit, which he wears home to Japan in a triumphant return. A second writes about managerial dress, emphasizing the ways clothing reflects corporate identity: the histories, personalities, and identities of both the companies and the managers. An art critic discusses
East/West exchange in art, especially the popularity of Japonaiserie among the fin-de-siecle Impressionists and post-Impressionists. He suggests that the Japanese artists who had gone to Paris and returned to Japan at the tum of the century were fundamentally changed by the experience; they also brought Paris back with them.
He ties this East/West exchange and the blurring of East/West distinctions to clothing and to the need for a suit reflecting this “blend culture.” An engineer and computer specialist talks about technological innovations in the fashion industry, forecasting future developments. Fashion, these ads tell us, is for real men.
Muramatsu Yllgen, a writer/novelist, offers an especially telling vignette thematizing style as a marker of national, racial, and gender identities. In a quirky, humorous, breezy testimonial, he says: Now for a Japanese, the suit . . . well, this is alien territory.
The Japanese were originally pros at wearing kimono, but in the span of just a hundred years, wear ing Western clothes has become our common sense. Should we comment on how quickly the Japanese can transform themselves? Find it amazing to change so much in the space of a hundred years? In any case, it’s indisputable that a lifestyle of European haircuts, beef, and Western clothing has firmly taken hold since Meiji.
From that moment, the importation of a “Western sensibility” began. The men (of Meiji) who had been at fashion’s cutting edge successfullyadapted their bodies to the demands of Western clothing. In this era these men achieved the same success with their economic endeavors. Now, if you look at their photographs-men who had only a short history of acquaintance with Western dress-you immediately notice their surprisingly fresh, stylish way of wearing the clothes.
It’s a strange shock to see that these Japanese men whose inner spirit was far from tranquil, whose spirit led them to do things like commit seppuku, were far more stylish than the men of today, who wear Western fashions in a Western way.
Maybe there’s an important hint here for the men who live in today’s socalled fashion era. If you think about body type [of the Japanese], … I sense the possibility of a style that reaches a good compromise, in a suit that’s a touch different from a Westerner’s. The suit envelops the Japanese soul. (Sebiro ga Nihonjin no tamashl. 0 tsutsunde iru.)
This is the promise for the future, this is the secret ingredient of a Japanese suit that transforms a former minus into a plus, a world of the Japanese suit that transcends the original. As in other vignettes, the preoccupation here is with preserving some sense of Japanese identity in the face of internationalizationlglobalizationltransnationalism. Again the historical referent is the Meiji period, citing a moment of national mobilization and success in imperial endeavors.
The play of inner and outer is thematized through intertwining racialized masculinities and nationalisms: the Meiji men who wore Western suits as though they weren’t really Western suits looked better than present-day Japanese men, who are more thoroughly acquainted with Western dress, presumably because the Meiji men were preserving something Japanese in their bearing.
It implies that the Meiji men were more manly because of their untamed, martial, truly Japanese spirit. Here, the invocation of seppuku, though comic and somewhat fearful, is eloquent. The stylish attractiveness of these men who lived by the samurai codes far surpasses that of today’s domesticated–dare I say feminized?-imitators of Western style. Muramatsu thereby writes a gendered, raced body distinctive in its stature, skin color, physical movements, and gestures.
This distinctiveness becomes the essence of Japanese identity. One could wear a Western suit while retaining such an essence, but even better would be a suit designed especially to express the Japanese soul. The transcendent, inspirational ring of that phrase echoes historically with powerful nationalist sentiment, from the relatively innocuous to the right-wing and jingoistic.
For example, it raises the specter of Yamato damash”i, the Japanese spirit linked to bushido, the way of the warrior, a key component of the ideologies and nationalisms of the SinoJapanese War and World War II. The citation is, quite frankly, stunning in its baldness.
This Japanese spirit animates the Japanese suit in a refigured world in which the Japanese have taken a foreign object, appropriated it and made it their own. Indeed, Nihon no sebiro surpasses in style, quality and appropriateness a “real” British suit tailored on Savile Row. Conversely, a suit is far more than frivolous adornment; it protects and expresses the Japanese soul.
Style, gender, and nationalism are inextricably linked. If you buy The Japanese Suit, you too can become a Japanese Man imbued with an essence of Japanese masculinity, who wears the suit made for his distinctive spirit and his distinctive body, a man who is no longer a feminized, Orientalized, domesticated subject vis-a.-vis the West.
Far from being an exclusively feminine preoccupation, Comme des Garçons tells us that fashion can become the idealized expression of Japanese masculinity. A third phase of the campaign picks up these themes, invoking even more explicitly the parallels between the 1980s and the Meiji era. Contemporary commentary evoking the Golden Age of Meiji gives way here to a more direct deployment of gendered masculinity and nationalism in the persons of historical figures-many from the Meiji period-who played key roles in the internationalization of Japan.
It features photographs of prominent writers and political figures, with accompanying text that ties their accomplishments to geopolitics and to style. This series narrates the need for a Japanese suit appropriate for this historical moment when Japan has taken its place as a world economic power. The suit here reflects personal character, national identity, and international prominence.
The vignettes mobilize a nostalgia for a Golden Age when Japan was able to respond to the threat of the West through the efforts of “great men.” Rearticulating 1980s concerns with kokusaika (internationalization) and with the continued global success of Japanese business, these ads construct a Japanese masculinity that is successful in challenging Western hegemony, where masculinity means dominance in the worldly domains of the political and economic, implicitly defined against the passive, Orientalized femininity of Japan’s opening to the West and its defeat in World War II.
One ad features a full-page photograph of CoW Shinpei, a leading government administrator in the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taish (1912-26) periods. The text reads: Born in the home of poor aristocrats in Mizusawa, Gow Shinpei was an impoverished student, dressed in “ragged hakama and mismatched geta,” the forerunner of “bankara” [the rustic, unconventional style of students of this era].
A practitioner of medicine, student in Germany, President of the Manchurian Railroad, Home Minister, a count, he lived through the Meiji era as one of its great politicians. In that period, bankara became haikara [stylish dandy], and he continued to create a persona that could take any garment and wear it with his refined, personalized sense of style.
In another sense, isn’t bankara perhaps like Japan’s punk, the explosion of youthful energy? Goto Shimpei was a person who throughout his life possessed the spirit of the avant-garde. This is the most obvious case of a discursively produced history that asserts a dubious historical equivalence. It enshrines Cow in a particular way: as someone who could be stylish in any situation-indeed, poverty is encoded as simple style in this text.
Power, internationalism, and the force to shape history are linked to fashion; being a great politician and being in vogue are presented as coextensive. Leadership means a position at the cutting edge of history and at the cutting edge of style. The final logical link, the comparison of bankara, the unconventional look of poor students, to punk, an English working-class phenomenon in its origins, posits them as historically equivalent explosions of “youthful energy,” eliding the vast cultural and historical specificities separating the two.
This move exemplifies the tendency of the fashion industry to reduce historical and political difference to consumable elements of style. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ad is the aestheticizing of politics. Walter Benjamin links this tendency to processes of objectification and selfalienation that enable “mankind” to “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (242).
In Benjamin’s case, this meant a celebration of the beauties of war thematized in fascist ideologies. Though the contemporary historical situation in Japan does not immediately recall the burgeoning militarism of the 1930s, certainly there is cause for disturbance in the encoding of class and poverty as mere ingredients of style.
Finally, the ads erase and even implicitly celebrate an entire history of Japanese expansionism and imperialism, in which Gow was centrally implicated as party to the annexation of Manchuria. In fact, this complicity is recuperated as avant-gardism.
Selectively stressing the ways Meiji leaders such as Gow responded to the Western challenge, the ad copy erases imperialist histories and creates subjectpositions for readers that allow the transfer of desired qualities to the consumer through the purchase of the product. In this case, the Japanese suit positions the buyer within a masculinized, nationalist legacy embodied in the personae of Great Men such as Gow Shimpei.
Clad in such a suit, the Homme Deux man can aspire to a similar position of greatness, defined through key masculine attributes: powerful leadership, a vanguard spirit, resourcefulness. Here, power and style are coextensive. A final campaign puts another distinctive spm on these themes. If Goto Shimpei and other Meiji leaders embody a masculinity based on political power and resourceful response to the West, if Muramatsu constructed a masculine essence based on an indomitable, ineffably Japanese spirit that resexualizes the male body, this campaign introduces heterosexuality as the necessary next step for the full construction of Japanese masculinity.
It features similar prominent historical figures in full-page headshots, but the commentary this time comes from contemporary women, followed by the copywriter’s text. Aimed at female consumers who purchase attire for their husbands and sons, these campaigns appear in the very proper women’s magazine Katei Gaho.
If in the other phases of the campaign, femininity serves as the ground for the figure of active masculinity, here “woman” emerges as the dialectical opposite for the existence of “man”: his audience, his mirror, his guarantor of heterosexuality. Fully reinscribing the gender binary, the ads invoke the female gaze as indispensable to the full performance of masculinity.
A particularly striking example features Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari as seen through the eyes of actress Kishi Keiko, who narrates their relationship as the classic pairing of the naive young ingenue and the worldly, seductive, dangerous older man. Kishi Keiko, a well-known actress, celebrity, and longtime Parisian resident, embodies cosmopolitan grace; Catherine Deneuve and Grace Kelly come to mind as cross-national parallels.
One of Kishi’s best known roles was Komako, the provincial geisha in the film version of Kawabata’s novel Snow Country. She alludes to this experience and to her first interaction with Kawabata, who at one point dissolves into an image of Shimamura, Komako’s lover in Snow Country:
The first time these penetrating, quiet eyes, burning with passion, gazed at me, I was in high school. I stood transfixed…. Sensei [Kawabata], who that day had come to see me play the role of Komako, stood there cutting a romantic figure in a suit, framed by the snow-capped mountain in the evening light behind him.
For an instant, I felt dizzy, as though sensei and Shimamura had become one. The night of my wedding reception in Paris, when sensei had done us the honor of acting as go-between, he gracefully picked up with his slender fingers a spear of asparagus that had appeared on the dinner table and elegantly ate it, the way French connoisseurs might.
I’ve never met another tuxedo-clad Japanese man who could eat asparagus with such style. Even now, the fiery eyes of Kawabata Yasunari sensei, who could wear both kimono and Western suits with breezy nonchalance and a uniquely refined sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility, live on within me (Kishi Keiko, actress).
Through Kawabata Yasunari’s works, brimming with beauty and acute insight, we are taught about the existence of the aesthetic consciousness at the foundations of the Japanese heart and mind. Beginning with his Nobel Prize lecture, and continuing with “Japanese Culture and Beauty,” “The Existence and Discovery of Beauty,” these works continued to take this message abroad. Beauty is the world’s common language.
Is it not the work of the next generation to continue to translate this message into concrete forms and theoretical structures and impart it to the world? In this passage, we find the copywriter engage a self-Orientalizing that deploys tropes of Japan as the land of the aesthetic, suggesting that aesthetics can ground claims to Japanese uniqueness, excellence, and moral superiority. Indeed, Japan can assimilate the best of the West while teaching the West about real beauty.
Skillfully, Comme des Garçons places the Nihon no sebiro directly in line with the works of Nobel-Prize-winning Kawabata, as heir to his legacy of creative genius and international acclaim. Taking on Kawabata’s mission of imparting the Japanese aesthetic sensibility to the world, Nihon no sebiro takes the necessary next step required of “our” generation by translating this Japanese aesthetic into material forms such as clothing.
The suit thus becomes the concrete embodiment of an essentially Japanese cultural superiority. Kishi’s testimonial completes the performance of racialized, nationalist masculinity; it is a brilliant gesture. Known for her cosmopolitan elegance, Kishi acts as idealized Other: judge, mirror, and appreciative audience.
Under her refined and knowledgeable gaze, Kawabata becomes a “real” man, who is sexually appealing but slightly dangerous, an older man of the world much like his character Shimamura from Snow Country. Such a man is at ease even in the most rarefied European circles, possessed not only of the savoir-faire to navigate the customs and manners of the French elite, but also with the confidence to break with those customs.
The gendered subject created here is cosmopolitan, acutely intelligent, passionate, and elegant. He is unafraid of being his own man, sufficiently self-possessed to wear either Western or Japanese clothing with panache. An alluring image indeed. Thus, the ad takes the construction of a satisfying Japanese masculinity to the next necessary level, heterosexualizing the subject.
Muramatsu used the indomitable, implicitly martial spirit as an essence of masculinity; Meiji political figures attest to the linkage of style with masculinity as political leadership. But the full (hetero)sexualization of the Japanese man can be fully realized only through the reinscription of the gender binary.
Kawabata is troped as the attractive, dangerous, famous older man, Kishi as young, nervous, naive. Yet Kishi is also the intended audience for the construction of maleness, the mirror through which heterosexual masculinity can be performed and seen. Although women are by definition in the position of relative subordination, they also are given the power to adjudicate and mirror who counts as a “real man.”
Thus, gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, and the transnational intersect in this picture of Nihon no sebiro and the man who wears it. He is both subject of masculinity and object of (female) desire. These advertisements construct a gendered Japanese identity. They create a subject of desire and the potential to fulfill that desire with the product they offer.
The text recreates a sense of inferiority to the West-an inferiority implicitly gendered as feminine-and offers a means for transcending the very discomfort it has discursively produced and amplified, one with its own complex history in the realm of geopolitics. Against a history of penetration, occupation, and cultural domination by the West and a historical situation positioning Japan as economically preeminent, they create a masculine dominance that refigures penetration as creative assimilation, constructing a raced, heterosexualized body that will be able to resist further penetration by the West.
This body can articulate the anger of having been racialized and denigrated; it is a body that can perform Japan’s global economic power. It is also a body implicated in imperial histories and continuing neocolonial projects. These colonizing imperatives are elided on the one hand through a focus on Meiji as a period of nation-building that sought parity with the West, suppressing the traces of militarism and expansionist aggression that accompanied the building of the nation-state.
On the other, the suit as sebiro invokes Britain’s class elitisms and the British imperial project, tacitly placing Japan in the role of Britain’s heir. All these complexities of subject formation can be condensed in a startlingly simple act: buying “The Japanese Suit.”
Contradictions animate the politics of reception in no less striking form when one removes the campaign from its domestic context. Lata Mani (1990) has written eloquently about the multiply mediated agendas at play when one writes for multiple and perhaps discrepant audiences. Analogously, the campaign takes on unexpected shades of meaning when we place the Japanese suit within a sedimented history of U.S.-Japan relations and the history of Japanese Americans and of raced Asian American bodies.
Despite the urgently necessary problematizing of Japanese rivalry with U.S. dominance and the uncritical celebration of nationalisms and imperialisms in the ad campaign, The Japanese Suit can produce unexpected readings when positioned in an Asian American politics and history.
For example, given a Japanese American history of incarceration, Japan-bashing discourses, and the recirculation of insidious racial tropes as a result of the trade wars, the construction of gender in the Homme Deux campaign can be seductive. The businessman is probably the most familiar contemporary stereotype of Japanese masculinity.
The bespectacled, camera-carrying, buck-toothed, asexual, emotionless automaton, the corporate soldier who threatens to invade the American economy, is here recuperated as a vehicle for ethnic and racial pride in an historical situation when anti-Asian racism continues unabated.
In such a climate, even an ad campaign that reclaims the businessman in a positive way can be compelling at one level. Asian and Asian American men single out emasculation and desexualization as their distinctive oppressions, and certainly that emasculation is countered deftly here in the construction of a Japanese masculinity that is (hetero)sexualized and powerful in the world.
On this plane, the advertisements skillfully and seductively mobilize counter-Orientalist discourses in the service of commodification and the provocation of consumer desire. Equally seductive is its use of the materiality of clothing to refigure normative identities. In industrialized societies clothing in standard sizes acts as a vehicle for the production of standard human beings, materially constructing who is normatively human.
One of the innovations of the Japanese avant-garde was to make clothing in only one size, which is then adapted to different body shapes, as are kimono. For example, in the U.S. accoutrements of authority in the academic and corporate worlds-lecterns, desks, chairs, plane seats in first-class-are obviously not constructed with many Asian American women in mind.
The size and scale of objects constitute seemingly trivial but profoundly telling practices of marginalization. From this perspective, the notion of garments made especially for one’s size and body type is deeply satisfying. As a strategically essentialist deployment of identity, as an intervention in Orientalist discourses, the Japanese Suit campaign mobilizes issues that could be profoundly significant, both for its intended Japanese audience and within a racialized U.S. context.
The seduction seems all the more insidious and poignant when we note that a raced body worthy of pride appears in an advertisement deployed in the service of capitalist accumulation. Given advertising’s raison d’etre, this surely indicates the skillfulness of the ads in pulling on issues that deeply compel potential consumers.
The campaign’s seductive and problematic resonances lead me to ask what is at stake not only for the producers/creators and consumers, but also what is our stake, and what are our interests as analysts? Here, the use of an unlikely object-an ad campaign-as a locus for the production of problematically alluring identities also leads me to interrogate further those arenas often presumed to be beyond commodification: for example, art or the academy.
Indeed, our consideration of The Japanese Suit lays the groundwork for our examination of another site where the discourses of nationalism and the transnational are deeply imbricated with figurations of masculinity: the world of social theory. On closer scrutiny, perhaps the ad campaign and our supposedly disinterested academic theorizing may share more than might be apparent at first glance.
Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the scholarship on transnationalism. Perhaps its most striking manifestation is the appearance of several journals, including Public Culture, Diaspora, and positions: east asia cultures critique. These institutional sites in the academy mark an epochal change through de-essentializing moves that disrupt bounded notions of the nationstate and of a coherent “culture,” tracing border transgressions and theorizing heterogeneities that subvert conventional categories.
For example, the inaugural issue of Public Culture does battle with the European and American monopoly on social theory and with schemas that associate modernity with the West and with homogenization: We seek to deparochialize debates about modernity and cultural hegemony, and to widen the tradition of intelligent observing of places and their practices …
In general, we oppose the view that the emergent transnational cultural forms and flows of today’s world are radically homogenizing, and that the burgeoning cosmopolitanisms of the world are but thin replicas of an experience we in the West are connoisseurs of ‘always already’ Public Culture 1 (Fall 1988): 1.
Such interventions have been valuable and contestatory. However, in examining the work of two exemplary figures who are among the most prominent theoreticians of transnationalism, I will address problems inherent in cultural politics and attempt to highlight the contradictions and tensions that animate critical interventions.
Arjun Appadurai and Paul Gilroy seek to displace Eurocentric hegemony in defining what counts as theory and what counts as legitimate academic inquiry in a series of important strategic moves: they disperse the subjects of theory far outside the bounds of Europe, write this work into a canon of intellectual thought, disrupt essentialist identities.
Their interventions have been part of a major conceptual advance in the academy. But oppositional stances are never free of complexity and contradiction, and in academic discourse as in the world of high fashion, contestations of some social forces may involve a reinscription of others. Here, the mutually constitutive, racialized discourses of the national and the transnational are riven by crosscutting forces of gender and class, and I will argue that the work of these theorists presumes a diasporic, always already masculine subject.
Arjun Appadurai has been a pivotal figure in the development of transnational studies as co-founder of Public Culture and author of a body of work that traces “global flows,” from The Social Life of Things to his present work on what he calls “postnationalism.” Public Culture has occasioned some of the most exciting contemporary writing in cultural studies and anthropology, infusing spirit and liveliness into the anthropological community and beyond.
Yet at times this focus on the public, the transnational and the cosmopolitan can and has come at the price of the local, the domestic, and the out-of-the-way, whose implicit devalorizing is arguably present in the very title Public Culture and its insistence on the urban and the cosmopolitan. Kamala Visweswaran (1994) has commented incisively on Appadurai’s essay on global ethnoscapes (1991), articulating skepticism about his valorization of deterritorialization as a spur to the imagination.
She treats critically his marshalling of examples and evidence (a novel by lulioCortazar and a film by Mira Nair) from highly disparate historical and political contexts, thus erasing specificity and the politics of location from which each artist speaks. In part invoking Caren Kaplan’s arguments on deterritorialization, Visweswaran continues: Appadurai’s project partakes of a transnationalism devoid of any politics of location or constituency, for it is difficult to discern in his schema whether subjects choose deterritorialization, or deterritorialization has chosen particular subjects….
Uncritically theorized notions of deterritorialization project too comprehensively a ‘global homelessness’ and displacement, trivializing the political particularities of the phenomenon and erasing the ‘resolutely local’ homesites necessary both for First World anthropologists to interrogate their own privilege and for less privileged subjects to claim home as a place of nurturance and protection.
Is it coincidence, then, that while many feminist theorists identify home as the site of theory, male critics write to eradicate it? (Visweswaran 1994: 110, 111). The gendering of the diasporic imperative is both more subtle and more explicit in a recent Appadurai essay, “Patriotism and Its Futures,” in which he argues for postnationalism as both a descriptive term and a utopian horizon of possibility. Here nationalism and transnationalism are gendered in interesting and contradictory ways; masculinity is treated as both coextensive with nationalism and the origin of nationalism’s transcendence.
Nation is associated with men and with fixed identities: “For those of us who grew up male in the elite sectors of the postcolonial world, nationalism was our common sense and the principal justification for our ambitions, our strategies, and our sense of moral well-being” (Appadurai 411-12). He suggests that challenges to the bounded integrity of the nation-state have come from various quarters, including those one could call feminist and perhaps even gay/lesbian: “Does patriotism have a future? And to what races and genders shall that future belong?” The question suggests that feminists and people of color have made moves to subvert the masculinity of the nation-state.
Simultaneously, the transnational is marked masculine; indeed, Appadurai reveals its paternal origins: “My doubts about patriotism (patria-tism?) are tied up with my father’s biography, in which patriotism and nationalism were already diverging terms. My father’s distrust of the Nehru dynasty predisposed us to imagine a strange, deterritorialized India, invented in Taiwan and Singapore, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, quite independent of New Delhi….
So there is a special appeal for me in the possibility that the marriage between nations and states was always a marriage of convenience and that patriotism needs to find new objects of desire” (413). Here, the language of kinship, patrilineal affiliation, and courtship is striking, but consistent throughout is a privileging of the postnational as originating in the paternal.
The postnational, then, is complex and contradictory: both paternal in origin and open to gendered multiplicity. The postnational is also profoundly raced. Whereas the U.S. nation-state is a space of whiteness, the postnational is marked by whiteness that cannot contain its colored and other heterogeneities. A laudable and impassioned political imperative underlies this formulation: to combat the racist essentialisms that mark the lives of those defined as racially marked citizens.
In a moving passage, Appadurai speaks of his oscillation “between the detachment of a postcolonial, diasporic, academic identity (taking advantage of the mood of exile and the space of displacement) and the ugly realities of being racialized, minoritized, and tribalized in my everyday encounters” (422).
Certainly, those of us who are “of color” in the United States find this passage richly resonant. If racism is linked to forms of nationalist essentialism, then for Appadurai postnationalist space becomes a utopian one, where hybrid, heterogeneous identities can be recognized as legitimate, and where debate, multiplicity, difference, can be celebrated: “In these postnational spaces, the incapacity of the nation-state to tolerate diversity (as it seeks the homogeneity of its citizens, the simultaneity of its presence, the consensuality of its narrative, and the stability of its citizens) may, perhaps, be overcome” (428).
However, in this subversive challenge to fixity and confining unity, Appadurai makes a problematic second leap, seeing the racially marked body as mired or imprisoned in specificity. Perhaps most tellingly, throughout the article postnationalism and deterritorialized identities are associated with freedom and possibility; the too-celebratory valorization that Visweswaran so acutely noted results in an implicit enshrining of a diasporic Master Subject.
First, he describes hegemonic deployments of the trope of the tribe, decrying nationalist/racist essentialisms that marginalize racial others: “As many of us find ourselves racialized, biologized, minoritized, somehow reduced rather than enabled by our bodies and our histories, our special diacritics become our prisons and the trope of the ‘tribe’ sets us off from another, unspecified America, far from the clamor of the tribe, decorous, civil, and white, a land in which we are not yet welcome” (422-3).
When Appadurai invokes the “detachment of the postcolonial, diasporic, academic identity” and the “ugly realities of being racialized, minoritized, and tribalized” or troping “special diacritics” as “prisons,” the contrast writes a longing and a desire. Though “tribe” or “prison” refers to the dominant racial/nationalist imaginary, he appears in some ways to accept its terms and yearns for transcendence of the specific, of the shackles of the raced body.
But who emerges when we have thrown off the shackles and escaped the prisons of specificity? I would argue that it is precisely the detached, exilic Master Subject. Abdul lanMohamed (1991) calls this the position of the “syncretic border intellectual” who stands apart from the “home country” or the country of residence.
Tsing (1993) further elaborates the different stakes and political battles engaged from postcolonial and minority discourse positions, in which the goal of the former is to escape racial marking, the second to embrace it to combat erasure under the sign of the (always already white) universal subject.
Appadurai’s diasporic subject ideally possesses no racial marking and is apparently endowed with sufficient resources to choose to some degree the space of “exile and displacement.” Although I passionately concur with Appadurai’s challenge to the forces of racism in the United States, his choice of weapons proves problematic.
Despite gestures toward feminism, the text implicitly reinscribes the whole subject of liberal discourse in the guise of a traveller who can enjoy the dizzying free play of difference on global terrain, thereby minimizing the historically, culturally specific power relations that constitute and inscribe that difference. In contrast to Appadurai’s (always already male) longing for the transcendence of specificity and locality, perhaps it is precisely careful attention to the power relations constructing particular sites-including the postnational-that will prove enabling.
It is of these processes, not (only) of deterritorialization, but of reterritorialization (Kaplan 1990; Visweswaran 1994) that so many feminist scholars write. The production of locality, community, and home, can provide a provisional safe place for those “on the margins,” whose “homelessness” is not chosen.
Though critically important and contestatory on one level, Appadurai’s strategies reinscribe a problematic gender and class politics at another. The potential contradictions animating progressive, oppositional work on the transnational emerge in Paul Gilroy’s landmark formulations. His book The Black Atlantic (1993) makes key contributions: (1) It examines African diasporas on both sides of the Atlantic, combatting African American hegemonies in the discourse on Black identities as well as essentialist Afrocentrisms emanating from all quarters;
(2) It positions Black intellectuals as equals within the canon of Western philosophy; (3) His analysis highlights hybridity and heterogeneity, subverting assertions of racial, national, or other forms of purity; (4) The book convincingly proposes that performative genres count as vibrant, vigorous forms of theorizing and vehicles of cultural identity formation. A tour de force, the book has been an influential text in the recent focus on diaspora.
Like Appadurai, Gilroy engages a gender critique. For example, he notes the masculinist biases of the many male theorists he discusses, pointing out their theoretical premises, which often entail the implicit or explicit subordination of Black women. For some, nationhood is coextensive with the patriarchal family; others idealize Black womanhood as the symbol of the integrity of Black community.
Further, Gilroy takes on the sexism of some forms of rap, arguing that “gender is the modality in which race is lived. An amplified and exaggerated masculinity has become the boastful centrepiece of a culture of compensation that self-consciously salves the misery of the disempowered and subordinated” (85).
He goes on to argue that relations between Black women and Black men form the ground of racial identity, and writes critically on conventional gender relations: “Without wanting to undermine struggles over the meaning of Black masculinity and its sometimes destructive and anti-communitarian consequences, it seems important to reckon with the limitations of a perspective which seeks to restore masculinity rather than work carefully towards something like its transcendence” (194).
However, argumentation pivots on one’s choice of antagonist, and Gilroy’s primary project involves attaining coeval status among the Fathers of European high theory and white, male progressives such as E. P. Thompson, who write nationalist, working-class histories that erase race as a significant axis of identity. Gilroy’s battles presuppose an intellectual patriline, and he thus stops short of more thoroughly problematizing theory as a man’s game.
Despite gestures toward feminism, then, ultimately the potential contributions of this scholarship to the very problems Gilroy treats is of secondary concern. When the discussion turns to hybridity and heterogeneity, this presumption is particularly telling~ Rather than theorizing the simultaneity of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the like in the formation of the transnational, Gilroy tends, strategically, to overprivilege the commonality of Black culture shared in diaspora, as Jacqueline Brown acutely observes.
The place given feminist scholarship becomes apparent in Gilroy’s analysis of the work of Patricia Hill Collins. Taking her as representative of feminist theory in general-highly problematic given the multiplicity of contemporary feminisms-he questions her Afrocentric feminist standpoint theory that would base its claims on an unproblematized “experience” and the reinscription of the whole subject of liheral discourse. Here, the criticism is well taken, as Gilroy rearticulates many poststructuralist feminist criticisms of standpoint theory.
Ultimately, however, it appears that the critique of Hill Collins is deployed simply to justify the validity and usefulness of the Hegelian dialectic. The text continues: “For all its conspicuous masculinism and Eurocentrism Hegel’s allegory is relational. It can be used to point out the value of incorporating the problem of subject formation into both epistemology and political practice.
This would also mean taking a cue from a politicized postmodemism and leaving the categories of enquiry open” (ibid.). Feminist criticism here serves as a straw woman, a vehicle to recuperate Hegel. Another interpretive strategy might have made alliance with poststructuralist and materialist feminisms which also challenge standpoint theory, while simultaneously engaging sophisticated critiques of the recirculation of Hegel and other fathers of Theory.
A related issue arises in Gilroy’s intriguing appropriation of the Bakhtinian chronotope. He offers both the ship and the railroad as dense articulations of particular space/time conjunctures. Since the chronotope of the ship invokes the Middle Passage, it stands primarily for the period of slavery and the forcible removal of Black men, women, and children from Africa.
The ship features equally in the lives of key Black figures neglected in (white) British histories, among them histories written by leftist progressives. Gilroy focuses on the sailor and the Pullman porter as emblematic of the historically overdetermined travels characteristic of the Black Atlantic: the sailor “crossing borders in modem machines that were themselves microsystems oflinguistic and political hybridity” (12), and the Pullman porter “who benefits from the enhanced mobility provided by modern technologies but does so in a subordinate role, managing the travel experiences of others and servicing their needs at the expense of those of his own family” (133).
Both are tropes of masculinity that were ideologically and empirically central to Black Atlantic diasporic experiences. However, their inscription in the narrative immediately points toward the text’s exclusions: the experiences of Black female subjects in creating, articulating, and perhaps subverting this always already masculine discourse.
Jacqueline Brown notes that is is crucial to take into account the complex, differential figurations and appropriations of diaspora, where class and gender also nuance identities mediated through race. Her study of Black Liverpudlians and their articulations of diaspora through identification with Black Americans carefully differentiates the ideological centrality of the seafaring man and the very different and more punitive discourses that affect Black Liverpudlian women, whose lived versions of diaspora might, for example, involve relationships with Black American sailors.
She argues: It is precisely issues of class, sexuality, and gender-as these fonn the terrain for local negotiations of power-that split the category Black, providing people with quite different motivations for seeking affinnation from Blacks elsewhere.
The most serious elision, then, in Gilroy’s work concerns the possibility that actors may assign mutually contradictory meanings to the Black cultural productions they appropriate (7). Attention to this degree of complexity and specificity represents the next level of political and theoretical intervention.
What then can we say about the circuits of the transnational? One striking commonality appears to be the interdependence or inextricability of nationalism and transnationalism. Binaries of nationalism and trans- or post-nationalism, hybridity and essentialism, recur throughout the disparate sites of geopolitical formations, high-fashion advertising, and academic discourses.
For far from being superseded, the national has obviously summoned striking allegiances in the contemporary period, where the national/racial essentialisms of the Japanese Suit ads are but one instance in an age of phenomena like the resurgence of Eastern European nationalisms. As Katherine Verdery noted, “Is it that the increase in transnational/trans-statal processes, through which capital is being further concentrated on a global scale, generates at the same time movements of resistance cloaked in the mantle of particularism and specificity?
That is, do we have yet another dialectic of concentration/centralization and resistance, with transnationalism and nationalism constituting one another’ mutually?” (17). For Appadurai in particular, this contemporaneous or mutually constitutive feature of identity formation seems elusive; rather, the term of postnationalism is (over)privileged, thus constructing a linear narrative of redemptive possibility. For Gilroy, the hybrid and the heterogeneous are associated with the diasporic. Yet, these may also be inextricably bound to prac tices of essence fabrication.
Analysts such as Naoki Sakai write of the ways universalism and particularism, essentialist nationalism and internationalism, are mutually constitutive discourses. Further, there is the political, contextually specific necessity to assert essentialist identities, as theorized in Chela Sandoval’s notion of oppositional consciousness and Spivak’s mobilization of strategic essentialism.
At this point, a return to the Japanese Suit campaign may offer insight, for Japanese fashion is precisely a transnational phenomenon shaped fundamentally by nationalist discourses, whether in the tropings of the Japanese designers as such by an international fashion press, or the ways the Japanese Suit ads depend upon transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and global -geopolitical histories that are used precisely to undergird a masculinist, racial, class-specific, nationalist essentialism.
In all sites, the imbrication of these national/transnational discourses with those of gender and race are inescapable. In all, the combatting of racisms (and in the case of the academic analysts, nationalisms) have resulted in the reinscription of gender dominance; in the cases of Appadurai and of the ads, class elitisms are pervasive.
In part, this is indicative of the complexity of cultural politics and the contradictions potentially animating the deployment of any oppositional strategy. Yet the matter is more complex. Despite gestures toward feminist criticism, both Appadurai and Gilroy figure intellectual debate as a patriline and miss opportunities to make links with the vigorous theorizing of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and category crossings in the work of women of color like Chela Sandoval, Kamala Visweswaran, Gloria Anzaldua, Marta Savigliano, Jacqueline Brown, Lisa Lowe, and others.
Such alliances might have drawn further attention to the complexity and multiplicity of levels at play in discussions of hybridity and heterogeneity. The contradictory cultural politics animating both the ad campaign and the work of the two male critics speaks eloquently to the salience of the positionality of our critiques and to the particular battles we therefore choose to engage.
Like the Japanese Suit campaign, with its argument for the distinctiveness of raced bodies, their work is understandably appealing in their challenges to racist and nationalist essentialisms, whether in the domains of (always already male) European high theory or in white feminism. Still, interventions at one level can be compromised by reinscriptions of power at another; the workings of masculinities in the world of theory instantiate those kinds of reinscriptions.
Class also emerges as such a force in Appadurai’s work, which presupposes a diasporic, cosmopolitan subject largely able to choose the ways he can ride the currents of transnationalism. One wonders, then, who and what are elided in these formulations.
What of those people who have little choice of when and where to move, those who cannot move at all, or those who must politically assert a specific, local identity for specific political ends? Such questions and new feminist scholarship on diaspora highlights the necessity of attending carefully to differential appropriations of phenomena such as transnationalism.
Accordingly, foregrounding positionality enjoins us to scrutinize what is at stake given particular locations, for only the Master Subject can presume to speak from everywhere and nowhere. Edward Said proposes the metaphor of the academic as traveler, who transgresses national and other boundaries, as a replacement for the image of academic as potentate, issuing decrees of truth from the Ivory Tower. The image of the traveller is surely compelling.
Yet even this notion may be wanting, for Said claims that “the image of traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics” (1994: 17).
In light of scholarship calling attention to the political, sometimes imperial, relations implied in tourism and travel and the likely detachment of the traveler from local struggles, I would seek another image: someone whose travels are not desultory, but who has a stake in being somewhere, making commitments to build or to transform those somewheres.
Undertaken from a site of privilege, such an image invites charges of Orientalist noblesse oblige; undertaken from sites of lesser privilege, this is the position Abdul JanMohamed calls the “syncretic border intellectual,” what Kamala Visweswaran calls “homework,” what I have called engagement in a common struggle.
My project in juxtaposing the work of these male analysts of the transnational with the Japanese Suit campaign is not to trivialize the former, but to occasion reflections that may count as homework. Conventional discourse posits the relationship of the academy to the fashion world as one of depth to surface, the monastic conceit of pure, profound intellectual pursuit invidiously contrasted with the mindless celebration of shallow trends and superficial decoration.
Subverting the surface/depth binary is a compelling challenge in light of the moralizing fashion provokes,. with its obvious enmeshment in processes of commodification and objectification. I hope to have suggested in this article and in other work that matters are much more multiply nuanced, and that limited contestatory moves always riven with contradiction-can occur “even” in this world of “surfaces.”
Subverting the surface/depth binary thus becomes a way of interrogating our own sites of privilege, for we in the academy can hardly claim to inhabit a pristine space apart from the forces of commodification, commercialization, or the pursuit of marketable difference.
We all participate in a capitalist publishing industry; some chase crossover dreams (sell-out, accessibility, or both?) with trade books and lucrative contracts. The persistence of the myth of originary genius and the enshrining of the author (despite his “death”), feeds the need, in commodity capitalism, for the marketable difference that makes individual careers, even as “new” ideas develop and extend a larger conceptual vocabulary and reflect transformations in the world.
Inevitably then, concepts like “the transnational” or “diaspora” become forms of assimilable, consumable difference. The “star” phenomenon is certainly another aspect of our regime of consumer capitalism, where the discourse of originary genius intertwines with those of celebrity and the hunger of the market for the “new” and the “hot.”
By making such arguments, I am not attempting to imply that I somehow speak from a pristine space outside these forces. This is precisely not an argument for a right-wing anti-intellectualism or an unproblematized empiricism that sees cultural studies or theoretically vigorous work as merely trendy. The lives of all academics and all denizens of consumer capitalist societies are inextricable from the forces of commodification.
The question is not how one can transcend it-as though one could-but how within it one can make interventions that matter. At some level, like the authors of the Japanese Suit campaign, we who write are out to sell our writing, our theorizing, our political challenges. This does not necessarily negate our efforts to be contestatory.
Rather, perhaps this is the most realistic appraisal of one kind of inevitably complicitous intervention in such a commodified world as ours. Our enmeshment in capitalism and the contradictions enacted when we seek to make moves that are purely contestatory emerge as themes in both the ad campaign and in our academic interventions.
Academia and fashion are not exactly the same, nor are the challenges to Orientalism and racism made by the ad campaign as effective as the theoretical/political challenges made by the critics. Nonetheless, precisely because we presuppose a radical disjuncture between these worlds, I have suggested that there might be fruitful cause for reflection in holding them together for a moment.
The Japanese Suit shows us how consumption might work when it pulls on issues compelling to the people who are its prospective consumers, offering wish-images that, at the very least, articulate our deep desires and fears even as it does so in obvious service of capitalist accumulation.
These complexities also appear in the domain of the academy and point us toward the contradictions that animate our own enterprise. Both the academic conceit of disinterested scholarship and the progressive conceit of liberatory intervention are belied in the scholarly work on the transnational and diaspora, where critical developments at one level can reinscribe other power relations at another.
Yet neither set of contradictions should immobilize our attempts at critical intervention. They lead us instead toward a critical scrutiny of our own sites of enunciation, an explicit recognition that the battles one chooses to fight and the positions from which we mount our arguments matter, and matter crucially.
In the end, both ad copy and academic theory return us to the questions we posed at the outset: Where are we positioned? What is at stake?