Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 34
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Popular Culture Review
important differences in the ways in which each discourse has developed. Very
briefly, I would suggest that the postmodern proclivity for the city over postcolonial
regional spaces has become increasingly apparent. Further, while postcolonial theory
is inherently and rigorously political, practitioners of postmodern spatial theory
have acknowledged that their critical practices have the potential to empty out all
political content - falling into a kind of spatial fetishism ( See Soja, 1989, and
Keith and Pile, 1993). Once space is fetisized it becomes an open and available
site that can be used for a variety of discourses - the deployment of “Chinatown”, I
would argue, is one such example.
My final suggestion then is that the space o f “Chinatown” is like the
Bonaventure (or indeed the L. A. of spatial theory) in that both have become, for a
variety of vastly different reasons, sites of fetisized spatiality. The colonial logic of
a binarized east/west, orientalism/occidentalism, has ensured that “Chinatown”
functions paradoxically, as a mysterious urban space that invites and repels discovery
and exploration. The detective’s gaze will return there again and again in a bid to
crack the code of the Orient, largely the code of his/her own making. The act of
deploying “Chinatown” is highly political and contentious, but the continued use
o f “Chinatown” assumes (and in a limited sense creates) a certain neutrality; such
a well-deployed symbol has been emptied out, reified, to function as the falsely
benign “idea” of Chinatown - that “little comer of the Far East”. Postmodern spatial
theory’s repeated return to the L.A. site, for all its talk of difference and
discontinuities, is also in danger of reifying a site to hold a single, all encompassing
idea - postmodern spatiality. Using LA as the quintessential city of postmodernism
is highly political, and even contentious, but its repeated deployment makes it
difficult to see it in this way. This is not an attempt to simply equate the defining
forces of “orientalism” with that of “postmodernism”; rather, it is to invert Soja’s
maxim by way o f a warning. Soja tells us to “always spatialize as you historicize”
(Soja 1995, 22-23). I will end with the reverse emphasis: “always historicize as
you spatialize.”
La Trobe University
Karen Lynch
Notes
1. A long list of critics, including Spivak, Soja, Hooper, Keith and Pile, hooks, Gilroy,
seem to be interested in strategically maintaining some semblance of “modernist” identity
politics for specific reasons. As Keith and Pile discussing Gilroy and “Black” identity
politics argue, political mobilization of a “black” resistance, culture, politics, history
and so on “produce a space in which identities are momentarily authenticated, on which
what might be called arbitrary closure occurs” (Keith and Pile, 18). Gallop holds a similar
position, in relation to feminism: