Postmodernity and Cross-Culturalism (review)

This collection of eleven essays advertises itself as an exploration of "East-West cross-culturalism" (14) and, by implication, promises to contribute to a non-Eurocentric understanding of postmodernity. What underpins editor Yoshinobu Hakutani's choice of selections is the idea that, due to the information age, postmodernity has been more susceptible to cross-culturalism than modernity was. In his introduction, he states that postmodern decentric modes of writing collapse the established distinctions between "East and West, America and Europe" (12). Japan serves as a viable example for Hakutani, a place embodying the contradictory discourses of East-West cross-culturalism: fundamentally an Eastern culture, he claims, Japan is, in fact, regarded as a "leader of postmodern society" (14).

The selected essays perform a broad range of literary analyses; they involve, for instance, discourses of postcoloniality, postmodern conceptions of history, linguistic hybridity in Indo-English narratives, and American literary influences upon Japanese authors. The texts in focus range from Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Richard Wright's Pagan Spain to Kamala Markandaya's The Golden Honeycomb and short stories and novels by Japanese authors, Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe. This impressive scope notwithstanding, the essays overall read unevenly in their theoretical rigor and conceptual depth. One feels that the book extends itself into multiple, confusing directions. For example, although the collection is an examination of literary forms, one essay is devoted entirely to two films—Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samaurai and John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven—without any preceding discussion of cinematic medium and its relation to cross-culturism.

The two most engaging essays in this collection involve Korean and Korean-American narratives: Jinhee Kim's elegant discussion of a Korean drama, Please Turn Off the Lights by Man-hee Lee, and Nicole Cooley's compelling analysis of Dictee, an avant-garde narrative by the Korean-American artist and writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Both authors carefully articulate their understanding of cross-culturalism contextually. For Kim, it is a nuanced question of Western hegemony and "cross-cultural transmission" as she examines the Korean reception of Man-hee Lee's play, on the surface influenced by Western dramatic structures; for Cooley, cross-culturalism regarding Cha's work means seeing her own exile and displacement (from Korea to the United States) as displaced onto her own work (118). What is particularly attractive in Kim's and Cooley's discussions is the need to see cross-culturalism through a complex feminist critique of language, representation, immigration, hybridity, and traditional notions of identity. Kim and Cooley do not allow the readers to romanticize East-West cross-culturalism or see it merely on the level of literary aesthetics experiments. Instead, the readers are reminded how postmodern discourse has been profoundly reworked by transnational feminist theoretical interventions. On this level, both essays evoke Inderpal Grewal's and Caren Kaplan's well-known collection of essays, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, and their thesis about the need to dislocate the primacy of the Western gaze.

Many readers may be drawn to this publication expecting an engagement of such critical discourses of the late-twentieth century as, for example, transnationality, neocolonialism, and imperialism. Even though some of the essays are situated within these complex theoretical frameworks, overall, the central thesis of the book about East-West cross-culturalism left me confused. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the introduction, as a conceptual guide for the book does not offer a precise definition of East-West cross-culturalism. Furthermore, although many readers will likely presume "cross-culturalism" to be associated with the experiences of immigration, refugeeism, exile, or dislocation, Hakutani's articulation of "crossing cultures" does not foreground discourses of displacement. Instead, it remains on the level of center-margin rhetoric: "The very margins, which were suppressed in modernism [. . .] have come to gain power in postmodernist writing. Such margins are converted to signs of power, and these signs are...