Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context (review)

492 Rhetoric & Public Affairs focus on the ways in which communication often works against particular identities and interests, Peters is asking us to explore the idea of an expanded democracy by understanding communication's creative fluidity rather than by framing it as fraught with divisive chasms. It is with this understanding of communication that Peters makes numerous calls in his conclusion which, out of context, would seem wildly wishful and optimistic. Peters calls for a democracy which "would have to include a much wider range of creatures than humans, for human themselves are many creatures. Full democracy would be transspecies, transgender, transrace, transregion, transclass, transage, transhuman: what Emerson called 'the democracy of chemistry.' Even the dead world would be invited" (26). Moreover, Peters notes that such an understanding of democracy, such an understanding of communication as always a matter of working toward cooperation, cannot be based on a model of "true understanding" and hence demands that we not expect others to "be true to our own interiority" but that we "have mercy on others for never seeing ourselves as we do" (266-67); "We ought to be less worried about how signs arouse divergent meanings than about the conditions that keep us from attending to our neighbors and other beings different from us" (269). The easy move would be to critique Peters for his unabashed faith in communication 's potential as neglecting current inequities. But this would indeed be the easy critique, because what Peters offers is so rich: by working through the history of the idea of communication, Peters has forced us to radically rethink our common-sense and theoretical approaches to communication, to rethink the creative ways we might more seriously rethink our world, rethink our differences as we work (and build worlds and walkways) cooperatively. What Peters does is acknowledge that while we must use commonly shared routes in making our way through everyday life, we can always walk these routes differently, paying attention to constantly changing environments, knowing full well that whichever route one takes, the journey alters, but the journey itself is not endangered. If we carefully work through the rhetorical/communicative dimensions of every walk, we can learn to shape the journey and to appreciate the democracy of chemistry, understanding "the delight that difference makes possible" (30-31). John M. Sloop Vanderbilt University Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. By Timothy B. Powell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999; vii + 294. $22.00 paper. Timothy Powell takes as his starting point an impasse in multicultural studies: now that the value of recovering historically silenced and forgotten voices and acknowledging the cultures in which they are embedded is recognized, multicultural Book Reviews 493 studies still are stuck in an essentially ethnocentric stance of binary oppositions. The project of Beyond the Binary is indeed a worthy one. Powell has assembled a collection of essays which seek to complicate the contexts, the inclusiveness, and even the very boundaries of cultural identity so as to turn attention toward "a critical paradigm that will allow scholars to study the polyvalent nature of lived cultural identity" (5). The introductory section by Powell provides a brief and simplified history of cultural studies, particularly the development of the binary structure so prevalent today. Powell traces the use of the binary structures used to deconstruct Eurocentrism from Frantz Fanon in 1952 and 1961, through Henry Louis Gates (1985,1988), through the insightful versions of cultural hybridity and mutual influence that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "The next step," claims Powell, "is to reconstruct cultural identity in the midst of a multiplicity of cultures, in a theoretical matrix where there are no centers and no margins" (5). The essays in the collection are detailed explorations of a great variety of examples situated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The essays are united, not in their suppositions (indeed the project of the book is the avoidance of advocating any ideological agendas or political directives), but in their attention to contextualizing their subject matter within complex social forces and racial attitudes, their complicating of boundaries through explorations of questions about the possibility of empathy across boundaries, and the possibility...