For a final version of this paper, please see:

1997. "Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15(5): 533-553.

Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity

by Katharyne Mitchell
University of Washington, Seattle

In much of contemporary cultural criticism there is a celebration of diaspora and hybridity as spaces of subversion. The terms are attractive because of the inherent instability associated with each concept. In contrast with the unappealing teleologies of modernist paradigms or the paralyzing binaries of either/or frameworks, hybridity and diaspora seem to offer a satisfyingly unstable and ambivalent alternative. For many poststructuralist critics, conceptualizations of the mobile, marginal, contradictory and ambiguous are especially soothing in a period where a growing number of Marxist and feminist scholars have demanded locations of actual resistance in addition to positions of textual critique. The "third space" of hybridity and the margins of the diasporic have been offered to the sacred altar of resistance as new sites of hope. These liminal spaces are theorized as important positions in the tactical war against dominant hegemonies. In particular, they are conceptualized as key sites of intervention in narratives of race and nation and as the chiasmic spaces of a progressive and liberatory transnational culture.

I'd like to draw out some assumptions implicit in these analyses and offer a partial critique of this growing body of literature. Without denying the potential for resistance, I critique the notion that the diasporic, the liminal and the hybrid can always be equated with a politically progressive agenda. I argue that the focus on linguistic and cultural disruptions to hegemonic norms and the implicit assumption of the nation as an abstract cultural space with borders which "contain" and which must be crossed or "translated" in order to intervene in the ongoing narration of the nation, obscures the importance of contemporary economic processes and of various kinds of diasporic, deterritorialized and hybrid subject positions that can be and have been used strategically for economic gain. In other words, liminal and partial sites can be used for the purposes of capital accumulation quite as effectively as for the purposes of intervention in hegemonic narratives of race and nation.

Just as it’s necessary to situate any discussion of hybridity and diaspora within history and political economy, it’s also critical to locate the concepts geographically. The overuse of abstract metaphors, particularly within frameworks which foreground psychoanalytic approaches, often leads to thorny problems of fetishization. As concepts such as hybridity become disarticulated from the historically shaped political and economic relations in which identities and narratives of nation unfold, they take on a life and trajectory of their own making. Second and third readings, borrowings, interventions, elaborations—all can contribute to conceptualizations that are not only completely removed from the social relations of everyday life, but which also, because of this very abstraction, become ripe for appropriation. The disengenuous move of the "third space" is to occupy a position "beyond" space and time, and beyond the situated practices of place and the lived experience of history. The space thus satisfyingly transcends the kinds of essentializing locations that characterize a certain branch of work in historical materialism and feminism. But without context, this "inbetween" space risks becoming a mobile reactionary space, rather than a traveling site of resistance. It is this problem of appropriation, particularly with reference to economic processes and agents, that I wish to investigate further in this paper.

Diaspora and hybridity

In the past, the invocation of diaspora has related most specifically to the situation of a people living outside of their traditional homeland. Historically, for example, the general dispersion or scattering of a "diasporic" people has been identified most closely with the dispersion of Jews among the "Gentile" nations. In contemporary usage in much of cultural theory, however, the term has come to signify a more general sense of displacement, as well as a challenge to the limits of existing boundaries. The tighter definitions that signified specific groups as diasporic, or which followed an ideal type model in which certain features taken together signified diasporas have, by and large, given way to broader conceptualizations of travel, displacement, dislocation, and divided loyalties. Clifford (1994), among others, has offered a useful contemporary critique of the kinds of constraints imposed by the normative assumptions of ideal type models. Although the attempt to define diaspora is important, it limits our understanding of the "ambivalent, even embattled" signifiying features of diasporic groups. It also elides the temporal process of change, wherein different societies "wax and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities" (p. 306).

With the broader conceptualizations of diaspora, however, come other kinds of problems. In particular, widening the discussion theoretically has increased the chance of disjuncture between, as Clifford puts it, "invocations of diaspora theories, diasporic discourses, and distinct historical experiences of diaspora" (p. 302). In the spirit of attaining comparative scope, and of loosening the restrictive anthropological discourse that has frequently situated the native as local and fixed, and the anthropologist as mobile and global, many theorists, for example, have fastened upon the concept of the informant as "diasporic" traveler, where the relations of movement and displacement are foregrounded over those of dwelling and local, confined knowledge. Here "the 'chronotope' of culture (a setting or scene organizing time and space in representable whole form) comes to resemble as much a site of travel encounters as of residence, less a tent in a village or a controlled laboratory or a site of initiation and inhabitation, and more like a hotel lobby, ship, or bus" (see eg. Clifford, 1992:101).

In the same vein, Arjun Appadurai's concerns about the previous privileging of the local and the representational in Western analyses of 'native' peoples (1988), has drawn him toward a celebration of deterritorialization in his discussion of disjuncture and difference in the new cultural mediascapes of late capitalism (1990). Here he has sought to escape the "metonymic freezing" of peoples' lives in Western anthropological discourse through an emphasis on historical mobility and ongoing displacement. Teresia Teaiwa (1993) has similarly foregrounded the figure of the "traveling native" in an effort to complicate a facile dichotomy between the tribal and the diasporic.

In all of these works, there is a powerful critique of prior narratives of fixity and mobility, and the power relations involved in them. This broad conceptual understanding of the ways in which the invocations of diaspora can have critical material and symbolic effects has provided a crucial impetus for scholars to further their research into the roots and routes of specific diaspora histories and geographies. Despite the imperative to contextualize, however, many contemporary postructuralist theorists have seized on the progressive theoretical potential of the term itself, and abstracted it away from the situated practices of everyday life. The identification of peoples who have multiple loyalties, move between regions, do not occupy a singular cultural space, and who often operate in some sense exterior to state boundaries and cultural effects, has proven attractive for theorists who have sought to disrupt normative narratives and understandings of nation and culture. Those in literal motion inbetween nations or outside of proscribed, static cultural locations become vaunted as the potential locus of cultural understandings that resist hegemonic norms of both race and nation.

The same abstracting away from a situated historical perspective has also occurred in numerous discussions of hybridity. The standard dictionary definition of the term is of a thing derived from heterogeneous sources or composed of incongruous elements. Not surprisingly, this definition has proven attractive for those interested in questions of identity and the constitution of subjectivity in a postmodern era. Many cultural theorists herald the ways in which apparently hybrid subject positions can facilitate multivocal communications and the production of syncretic cultural forms. Owing to the manifest lack of an essentialized or fixed identity (through the derivation from heterogeneous sources and incongruous elements), the hybrid stands as the perfect conduit for postructuralist understandings of the advantages of pluralism, ambivalence and non-fixity. Because of its neither-nor nature, hybridity is celebrated as a process rather than a thing; its inherent resistance to fixed binaries causes it to remain in a perpetual state of flux, related to and yet not originating from or causing other moments, spaces or entities. For many cultural theorists, it is this mobile undecidability that posits hybridity and hybrids as the perfect interlocutors of resistance to essentialist narratives.

With both diaspora and hybridity it is the spaces in the margins, the unfixed spaces in-between states and subject positions that are vaunted as the location of resistance and intervention in hegemonic narratives of race, culture and nation. Homi Bhabha, for example, writes of the importance of the "turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated" and heralds the "international dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between nations and peoples... (1990: 4, emphasis mine). Bhabha posits hybridity as a form of inbetween space, which he terms the "third space", a space inherently critical of essentialism and conceptualizations of original or originary culture. He writes, "For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge" (1990: 211).

For Bhabha, a critical component of these inbetween spaces is ambivalence—the avoidance of completeness or closure, and the notion of a thing (or space) holding its opposite within it: in Marx's more felicitous phrase, that which is "pregnant with its contrary". Following Derrida's discussion of language, Bhabha looks at "incomplete signification", or the places where connections in meaning are incomplete and ongoing (the signifier cannot connect exactly with the signified because of the "irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic")—and relates this to the spaces of the nation that are also incomplete or always already in process. In order to negotiate the meanings of cultural and political authority in the nation, Bhabha believes it necessary to examine the formation of the nation in the act of formation itself. The interrogation of the nation-space in the act of its composition, in medias res, enables the alteration of its hegemonic narration. For Bhabha, these incomplete, processual spaces are the ambivalent, "inbetween" spaces of the margins that allow for intervention and resistance in the narrative of the nation as authentic, whole and complete. He writes:

In this conceptualization, in order for there to be an ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of the nation—an "ambivalent margin"—there must first be "containing thresholds" or cultural spaces which can be marked in the process of their creation. Once "marked" these boundaries can then be crossed and erased. In a sense then, the possibility of intervention requires the nation to be conceptualized as a culturally bounded space; boundaries can be recognized in the act of their formation, and only once recognized can they be transgressed.

The emphasis on the cultural spaces of the nation—spaces which can be marked and then crossed—leads a geographer to the more prosaic, yet critical question: what are the actual physical spaces in which these boundaries are crossed and erased? In Bhabha's work, however, nation-space is always abstract space, and it is always culturally inscribed. This abstract, cultural space, furthermore, provides the crucial contradictory place from which the pedagogical, "archaic" time of the nation can be exposed as ambivalent. It is through his juxtaposition of pedagogical time, wherein people are the 'objects' of the myth of the nation, and performative space, wherein people are subjects of the myth and act in its ongoing creation, that Bhabha is able to locate a position of potential intervention in national narratives. The slippage from a theoretically constructed, bounded cultural space to an abstract space "in-between nations", however, leaves the crucial space of intervention— the "ambivalent margin"—dangerously unmoored. Without context, it is possible to locate resistance in all spaces inbetween, in every liminal movement and minority discourse that supplements the nation and thus forces a renegotiation of political and cultural authority.

As Matthew Sparke has noted in his discussion of land claims by two first nations, the Gitskan and the Wet'suwet'en, against the federal government of Canada, this abstract notion of space neglects important questions related to the actual, often violent historical production of the spaces of the nation. In Bhabha's formulation, there is little sense of how the production of space can generate the terrain on which homogenization is secured, or the possibilites of "how space can be produced to co-opt plural traditions and histories into an abstraction of the single territorial collectivity we call the state" (Sparke, 1996: 56). Depending on the context and the social relations involved in the production of space, the abstract spaces of cultural liminality "within the nation" that may be generated through the intervention of the performative (Bhabha, 1990: 299), might equally well become spaces of closure and cultural homogenization. Or, as in the case of Hong Kong immigrants in Canada, the spaces created from a minority discourse within the nation might be strategically produced as the spaces of capital accumulation. Thus, Bhabha's psychoanalytical emphasis on the transgressive position of the liminal (occupying a position on, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold), relies on an abstraction away from the material social conditions of actual borders and spaces. He writes:

This understanding of the liminal figure of the nation-space privileges the political ideology of the state but elides the importance of economic ideologies. If the 'origins' myth of the pedagogical is one based on capital accumulation as well as on political narratives of tradition and territory, then the ongoing production or "performing" of the nation may actively extend an economic ideology. So-called "residual and emergent meanings and practices" may operate to extend the "transcendant" authority of laissez-faire capitalism as an all-embracing economic system—even while simultaneously diminishing the political authority of other national narratives. Bhabha's reliance on the political and cultural narratives of pedagogic nation-building allows him to code new or "emergent" narratives as inherently transgressive. This obscures the numerous ways in which culture always bears, as Adorno puts it, the stigmata of capitalism, and neglects to discuss how emergent or "counter" narratives can be used to further entrench regressive economic narratives.

In addition to the implicit connection between emergent narratives and progressive politics, Bhabha also explicitly links counter-narratives with an anti-essentialist agenda. He writes, "counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities" (1990: 300). Recent research by scholars such as Luis Guarnizo (1994; 1996), and Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992), however, has shown how accelerated transnational movements of capital and people across state borders have initiated new cultural narratives that both "evoke and erase" the totalizing boundaries of the nation-state, but also draw on and reinscribe "essentialist identities." In Guarnizo’s (1996) study of Mexico, for example, he has shown how the capital remittances of transnational migrants have proven so lucrative for many provinces that they have spurred an interest by the state in extending its control across international borders. In addition to the allocation of new kinds of resources and support for its cross-border citizens, including the option of dual citizenship, a state discourse of "Mexicanness" has reappeared. In this case the transnational movements of people and capital, which in the past was considered politically dangerous to a totalizing state authority, has led to a new essentialist discourse about Mexican identity. The new essentializing narrative of an 'imagined community' crosses previously fixed national boundaries and calls them into question, yet it is promulgated primarily from within the state itself. Transnational processes and spaces have led to new kinds of manipulations of community and nation, and narratives and counter-narratives of essentialized identities are used strategically by the state as well as by a multitude of other actors. Bhabha writes of Nation and Narration, "The representative emblem of this book might be a chiasmatic 'figure' of cultural difference whereby the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nation-space becomes the cross-roads to a new transnational culture." But his belief in the resistant, anti-essentialist nature of the transnational is abstracted away from the actual movement of people and capital across borders.

As with the anthropologists’ reversal of mobility and fixity, Bhabha's project of destabilization is important, and his emphasis on the links between language and nation-making invites a continual rethinking of the impact of the cultural. Yet the perpetual abstraction of space in his analyses allows for various theoretical slippages and makes an actual site of political intervention a slippery slope indeed. Robert Young argues that the critiques of Bhabha's "textualism and idealism" from scholars such as Mohanty, Parry and Ahmad involve a form of "category mistake": Bhabha's discourse analysis can provide a "significant framework" for more materialist-historical inquiries by emphasizing the ways in which language is "not transparent, innocent, ahistorical or simply instrumental," but a major part of a system of control (in this case colonialism) that permeates knowledge itself (see Young, 1995: 163). Although sympathetic to the power and importance of discourse analysis, I argue that theories that discuss space only in terms of linguistic or cultural metaphors will inevitably provide only empty theoretical "frameworks" as well (see also Smith and Katz, 1993; Sparke, 1994; Moore, 1996). The other "forms of analysis" of colonialism that Young outlines, such as "historical, geographical, economic, military [and] political", which he argues can be framed by colonial-discourse analysis, I argue must be theorized in tandem. Without this articulation, the ways in which the actual historical production of actual spaces is predicated on social relations of power, and influences the ways in which the nation is created, defined, imagined and maintained can become mute.

The dangers of ignoring history are also evident in the very concept of hybridity itself. Despite the general assumption of hybridity as a positive and progressive in-between position in contemporary cultural analysis, the concept of hybridity has had a checkered career. Through an historical examination of the concept of hybridity, Robert Young has demonstrated the contradictory and ambivalent nature of the term. Its deep imbrication in the scientific definitions of various racialization processes in Britain in the 19th century reflects its ability to transform itself and participate in the theoretical constructions of different eras. Its very transmutability—from a central position in biologism and scientism to a central position in culturalism—prompts Young to ask whether and how much our ideological networks and cultural categories have actually changed. He writes:

Hybridity is thus a loaded, historical term, a "keyword" that changes, yet contains its past within it. The contemporary usage of the concept in cultural criticism generally ignores this shady past, focusing on the cultural element of grafting and inbetweenness, rather than on the racial theories interred within. An abstracted contemporary cultural emphasis conceals hybridity's historical provenance and obscures the ongoing material effects of its colonial imbrications. A pertinent contemporary example of hybridity's glorification at the expense of the historical and material is evident in a recent article on hybridity in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Hybrid in Diaspora

In Lee's work the Hong Kong intellectual is positioned as the perfect hybrid subject—one whose "mixed-code hybridized language" can aid in the "perpetuation of Hong Kong's culture as a hybridity" (1994: 21-22). It is both this linguistic liminality and the ambivalent position between national cultures (of China and Britain) which Lee believes enables new spaces of resistance and new kinds of interventions in the national narratives of "Great China" and "Western civilization." He writes,

Lee argues that intellectuals who grew up in Hong Kong, and are either still in Hong Kong or have now emigrated to the West, would likely identify themselves as Chinese, or as a hybrid, or as "someone from Hong Kong—a purely geographical location devoid of national boundary and cultural identity" (1994: 12). The discussion of Hong Kong as a site "devoid of national boundary and cultural identity" is made in many places, as he discusses the territory's "lack of national identity" and cultural authenticity. As Hong Kong is depicted as a place inbetween China and the West, without real national borders and thus without any national imagining of a common territory, tradition or origins, Lee posits Hong Kong people as subjects uncompromised by the myth of origins or the necessity to "perform" or supplement the nation.

In Lee's analysis, it is Hong Kong's politically ambiguous and culturally ambivalent situation that has created the potential for a progressive "hybrid" intervention. The tremendously successful capitalism of the colony, noted by most of the rest of the world, is mentioned only as one of the reasons that Hong Kong has been a blind spot for post-colonial discourse; in other words, because of its very success, it has deconstructed the "romanticization of the colonialism-wrecked East" (1994: 12) and thus provided unsuitable fodder for numerous post-colonial critics. The separation of the economic and the cultural in his analysis is most clearly marked in the discussion of language, where linguistic liminality is theorized as a site "inbetween", a space that allows and facilitates critiques of both Great China and western civilization. Yet this "third space" is clearly a space related to capital accumulation in a very literal sense. As the author notes himself, English is learned as a tool in Hong Kong— one that is strategically important for business and a "necessity for social mobility and white-collar employment" (1994: 13). It is this English, incompletely learned, or learned and manipulated that forms the Chinglish hybrid which Lee finds so subversive. Language is theorized here as a product of colonialism and capitalism, one that allows for an inbetween subject positioning that may resist national narratives of authenticity and purity. Yet there is no conceptualization of how language may also be productive of spaces of colonialism and/or capitalism. Theorized in the abstract and culturally inscribed, a "hybridized vernacular" and "mixed-code language" is posited as inherently progressive because of its creolized nature. It is produced by economic and cultural forces, but then takes a position of antagonist ambivalence in an abstracted "third space". The economic provenance of this hybrid is lost, as is its potential to produce spaces that may be violent, retrogressive or strategically materialist.

The problem is compounded by the notion of language as something that is chosen and wielded at will. As Poster (1990) and others have discussed at length, people are constituted by and through language. The belief that Hong Kong intellectuals can "define our CCD from 'within' Hong Kong's hybridized culture" and manipulate this hybrid discourse in politically progressive ways (Lee's example is an AIDS special article composed of transcribed direct quotations), neglects the ways in which the economic, cultural, political and social threads woven into the very language of the "culture of critical discourse" infect the speaker and not just the words themselves. The notion of a culture of critical discourse, as Lee borrows it from Gouldner, abstracts away from the necessary situatedness of language and its imbrication in the economic as well as social practices of everyday life.

The implicit notion of a progressive hybrid choice for the Hong Kong intellectual returns as Lee asks, "May Hong Kong intellectual be used as a strategic corrective to the polarizing binarism between 'Chinese intellectual' and 'the (Western) universal intellectual'? He answers by suggesting that if this is possible it is through the popular culture of Hong Kong, because it is popular culture which allows a "hybridization of Chinese and Western" and does not insist on the "purity of imagined cultural polarizations." Hybridity is again conceptualized in terms of contemporary cultural and linguistic boundaries— boundaries that the Hong Kong intellectual can choose whether or not to cross. By virtue of their inherently ambivalent national positioning, Hong Kong intellectuals can occupy the marginal spaces which allow them the critical cultural distance to resist hegemonic narratives of race and nation. This conceptualization of a cultural position able to "detach itself from self-serving interest or unquestioned, but strictly limited, ends" is similar to that of Matthew Arnold's in Culture and Anarchy, written in 1869. Young (1995: 58) writes of Arnold's theories, "Culture, by enlarging one's range, facilitates a point of exteriority to the totality, and it is through this device that it can work both as a lever for subversion and as an inclusive, containing force of harmonization... Its attraction, therefore is that it gives the man of culture (and it is always a man) a special place— a mental place outside society—from which he can subvert anything in contemporary culture in the name of a higher or larger vision, exercising a double function of subversion and totalization through an oppositional stance." As Young goes on to demonstrate, however, Arnold's theory itself was fully immersed "within the ideology of his time."

Without contextualizing both the specific movements and constitution of hybrid subjects, as well as the historical provenance of theoretical terms "within the ideologies of their times", it would be easy to position Hong Kong Chinese "hybrid" and "diasporic" emigrants to Canada as the perfect conduits for "supplementing" the nation and forcing the renegotiation of its cultural and political authority. It would appear that this group, among all others, could make substantial interventions in the narration of the nation as the archaic temporality of territory and tradition, and provide the perfect chiasmic location for a new transnational culture. But interventions in hegemonic nationalisms that are posited in cross-border or transnational, transcultural spaces are limited by their reliance on an abstract notion of pre-existing space. For example, that national identity always originates and is supplemented in a nation-space is an assumption that doesn't always hold true. It could be argued that the origins myth, which Bhabha claims forms the roots of modern nations, is not necessarily singular (cf. Sparke, 1996: chapter 2) and not necessarily about a common spatial territory. For some contemporary Hong Kong Chinese citizens, for example, the foundation of national identity may be rooted in both historical memories related to China, and also to the common spaces of capital accumulation located in Hong Kong itself. The strategic use of ethnic identity as a signifier of nation-ness (in this case "Chineseness"), may not be entirely bound to literal roots in the sense of a rootedness in a common origin territory or nation-space, but may be bound more closely to another kind of location—one that privileges certain types of economic spaces, such as those of free market capitalism. It may also be a complicated mix of paradoxical or shifting allegiances and identities. It is only through an examination of particular histories and geographies that these issues can be understood with any clarity.

In the following section I examine these ideas by looking at some self-fashioning strategies of Hong Kong Chinese entrepreneurs who are engaged in business ventures in both "Asia" and "the West". I focus first on one of the hegemonic narratives of the type which Bhabha, Lee, et al, wish to disrupt. This narrative, which was prevalent in Vancouver in the 1980s, is the narrative of the literal rootedness of Anglo citizens in the physical spaces (soil) of the Canadian nation, a narrative which clearly excluded the recent Hong Kong immigrants to the city. I then discuss the counter-narrative offered by the Hong Kong-Canadian business community, and look more broadly at some of the self-fashioning strategies of Hong Kong Chinese businesspeople as they operate in the "liminal" and diasporic sites inbetween nations. Without denying the potential and indeed often realized resistance to many cultural narratives, such as that of rootedness, I foreground instead the ways in which counter-narratives can be and are also used for the purpose of furthered economic integration and capital accumulation.

Trees and the Roots of Nation

In Vancouver in the late 1980s, pervasive urban development led to major dislocations for numerous urban residents. Much of this development was related to voluminous capital flows from Hong Kong, as many Hong Kong capitalists sought secure locations for both capital investments and residence in Canada. Conflicts over rising house prices and apartment rents, housing and apartment demolitions and the construction of large, "monster houses" became imbricated in a racial discourse, as many long-term Anglo residents associated the rapid transformation of the city with the increased immigration and investment from Hong Kong. One of the most bitter sites of contention was the removal of mature trees from the lawns and gardens of houses slated for demolition and rebuilding. Numerous community movements, such as the Kerrisdale-Granville Homeowners' Association (KGHA), quickly arose to combat the "destruction" of the landscape and to protest the loss of ambience and character in the west-side neighborhoods of Vancouver.

In a neighborhood action against the felling of two giant sequoias in April, 1990, members of the KGHA protested by tying yellow ribbons around the trees a few days before they were scheduled to be removed. The protesters joined hands around the trees and left informational placards where bypassers could read them. A month later, after the two sequoias had been felled, forty neighbors from the area planted new sequoias in a city park to commemorate the loss of the older trees. The community organization invited high-school students from two schools to help plant the new trees. A reporter for the Courier described the tree-planting event with the phrase, "An eight-year-old boy helped turn the soil..." Cindy Spellman said of the planting, "It's worth it because we are planting the new trees for our children" (Quoted in the Vancouver Sun, 1990a).

The removal of mature trees and gardens in west-side neighborhoods caused greater anger and resistance than either the demolition of apartment buildings or the construction of the so-called monster houses. Trees were linked with an image of Vancouver that was extremely important for many Anglo residents to maintain. The tree-lined streetscape and even specific trees and gardens were identified with the essence of a west-side way of life; removal of the trees was threatening to this image and was fought with great vehemence. As Duncan and Duncan (1984) have written about Shaughnessy Heights, many of the west-side neighborhoods of the city were established in the image of a pastoral Britain of the pre-industrial era. The free-flowing landscaping and mature trees operated symbolically as a link to an imagined aristocratic past, but also as a bulwark against change, particularly the pernicious influences of change brought in from the outside. Canetti (1978: 84-85) writes of the forest:

As the trees were also considered to be living beings, their destruction was perceived in a particularly serious light. Resistance took on the character of a moral crusade. Those who destroyed trees were morally wrong or depraved; at the least they were misguided or uneducated. One activist protested the felling of two sequoia trees at 6425 Marguerite in Kerrisdale by invoking religious language in her speech at a neighborhood protest. She said dramatically, "These trees are part of the soul of the neighborhood" (Quoted in the Courier, 1990). After their removal, a reporter described the remaining empty space in terms of death and burial, again recalling metaphysical imagery: "All that remains of what one horticulturalist called 'the most perfectly matched sequoias in Vancouver' is two earth-covered stumps" (Vancouver Sun, 1990b).

Investing territory and things with human characteristics allows the naturalization of links between people and place. The connection between people and place —metaphorically expressed through tree imagery —is important not only in establishing, confirming and romanticizing those who are 'of the soil,' who are part of a traceable, genealogical tradition, who 'belong,' but also in identifying and demonizing transients or sojourners arriving from elsewhere —those who are 'without place.' The condition of placelessness or rootlessness in society is perceived and represented as pathological—and described so in moral terms (Malkki, 1992).

The moral element of the fray was clearly linked to a positive depiction of "the country" and a negative image of "the city" (cf. Williams, 1973). As a dichotomy between city and country morals and ways of living emerged, the Hong Kong Chinese often became identified as the essential city dwellers. These cosmopolitan urbanites, carriers of the ill effects of accelerated modernism, were set up in opposition to and confrontation with those who "love gardens." Virginia Cohen, a west-side homeowner, said in an interview:

In this statement, a past European heritage and an aesthetic sense of love for a well-proportioned garden is set up in contrast with the Hong Kong tradition, in which an inherent love of the garden is considered dubious. The love of the garden represents an old and venerable European way of life, a way of life which has "been the same for years." It conjures up images of large garden estates, rootedness, tradition, folk, soil, a past. The contrary image, of urban space and the lack of a proper "balance" of house and garden distills meanings of rootlessness, sojourn and transience. In specific neighborhood actions against tree removal, these images were invoked time and again, with the protection of mature trees coded as the protection of tradition, heritage and a nostalgic, communally-remembered past.

Both nation and culture are conceived in these rooted, territorialized and essentializing images and terms. Transience or 'decontextualized' culture threatens to denature and spoil these images of self-identification (Malkki, 1992: 34; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 18). Uprootedness is strenuously resisted, particularly by those who already feel a threat to personal or national identity. The loss of an arborescent, genealogically traceable connection to the past is connected with the loss of an imagined future community. The emphasis on this connection between past and future is ritualized in the gesture of using a child in the tree-planting ceremony. The symbolism of using an eight-year-old to "turn the soil" reflects a perceived movement of time from the heritage and traditions of the past, to the children and community of the future. In this vision, those who control the past control the future.

Apart from the sense of continuity that is advanced in these types of actions, there is also an implicit connotation of the right to judge what are appropriate and inappropriate activities on the landscape. The right to participate in the production of the landscape and its associated symbolic meanings is one that is held only by certain populations. These populations, who are themselves identified as "rooted", maintain and reflect the "correct" sensibilities that are appropriate to the land. Historically, the ability to participate in landscape production is one that has been predicated on highly racialized and gendered grounds (see eg. Rose, 1993; Haraway, 1989).

Graphic images connecting the preservation of Vancouver's trees with the preservation of Vancouver's future were evident in brochures such as the January, 1991 public information announcement concerning the proposal of new tree bylaws in the city. In this graphic, the white structure of the tree closely resembles that of a pregnant woman (see Figure 1). Inside the pamphlet is another image that shows a tree structure composed of roots or branches inexorably dividing into smaller and smaller limbs. The image resonates as one of connectedness and of natural and organic growth and fecundity through time.

In contrast with this fecund, pastoral imagery, sojourners and city-dwellers, who lack the direct connection to the past and the soil, are depicted as unable to participate in or even understand the imperative to guide and manipulate the future. As they are rootless (cut off) they can be portrayed as fundamentally unsolicitous of the needs of future generations. Although the majority of those resisting tree removal considered and presented their struggle as one of environmental protection, the aforementioned representations were vivid enough for many developers to contest the movements as racist. As with the monster house controversy, people I interviewed were extremely wary of and concerned about being considered racist. When asked if his organization's resistance to the felling of the two sequoias in April might be construed as racist, John Simmons said in a newspaper interview, "I don't care who is doing it. If people are doing something that is destructive to the neighborhood, there is going to be a reaction" (Quoted in the Vancouver Sun, 1990b).

Despite John's stance, however, the location of the two sequoias on the property of Arnold Wu, a Hong Kong Chinese immigrant and developer, whose daughter, Suzanne Wu, is a prominent real estate broker doing extensive business with Hong Kong, gave the conflict a racial cast. In many of the newspaper articles on the sequoia cutting and protest actions, the daughter's name was mentioned in connection with the event. During a period of extensive media coverage her Mercedes was vandalized. In Hong Kong, the story was a controversial high-profile news item for over a week, with the clear perception overseas that the resistance protests were racially motivated (Courier, 1990b).

Over thirty letters concerning tree management were sent to the Vancouver Planning Department between 1988 and 1990. A majority of the letters came from west-side neighborhoods and indicated a desire for more tree regulation by city officials. On March 7, 1989, city officials petitioned the province for the authority "to regulate the destruction or removal of trees and for making different regulations for different areas of the city" (Trees, 1990: 1). Although the B.C. provincial government declined to give the city authority over tree-cutting on private lots, city officials initiated new bylaws in early 1991 designed to protect mature trees in RS-1 (single family) neighborhoods. These bylaws drew from a 1990 study by a consultant team of planners, landscape architects, municipal lawyers and arboriculturalists entitled, "Trees on Single Family Lots: A Program for the Protection of Trees on Private Property."

In this planning guide "heritage trees" are outlined by neighborhood and by individual tree. In a complex mathematical calculation, specific trees are valued based on the diameter of the tree, the species type, its condition and its location (see Figure 2). In determining the value of trees in this 'objective' manner, the tree debate is removed from the emotionally charged atmosphere of racism described above. Using 'rational' planning instruments and scientific criteria, the value of individual trees are calculated in a separate sphere, one that is abstracted away from the messy contaminations of ideological debate. The effort to foreground 'reason' in the struggle can be seen as an attempt to maintain power. The introduction of racism as an element of the debate is an example of 'nonreason,' and can be dismissed.

What I've described here is one of the many ongoing pedagogical narrations of the nation which are contested by the Hong Kong Chinese immigrants. For example, in the specific disruption to the hegemonic narrative of nations and roots, a group of Chinese executives contested the urban and rootless images of the Hong Kong Chinese with a business fair, which they named, 'TRANS/PLANTS: New Canadian Entrepreneurs' (see Figure 3). The fair, organized by the Hong Kong-Canada Business Association (HKCBA), featured immigrant entrepreneurs engaged in trading and manufacturing. The intent of the exhibition was to counter the image of Hong Kong Chinese investors as exploitative real estate speculators by demonstrating the many tangible economic contributions of the Chinese entrepreneurs in areas of the productive economy. Real estate speculation, or "flipping" was a source of great anger for long-term residents, who felt that Hong Kong buyers were interested in houses only for profit, rather than for establishing "roots" in a long-term home. Bruce Wong, the President of the HKCBA, said of the business fair:

The term trans/plant, or transplantation elicits images of displacement in a positive sense, as something that remains viable and alive in a new setting. Rather than uprootedness, which resonates as an unwanted disrupture, it evokes a degree of will, or power in the movement. Malkki, (1992: 31) writes of the term 'transplantation': "It strongly suggests, for example, the colonial and postcolonial, usually privileged, category of 'expatriates' who pick up their roots in an orderly manner from the 'mother country,' the originative culture-bed, and set about their 'acclimatization' in the 'foreign environment' or on 'foreign soil'—again, in an orderly manner." Using the image of the transplant as a Chinese entrepreneur, rather than a white colonial expatriate, again reverses pre-established meanings of nature and normality. 'Civilization' is brought from the seed-bed of Chinese entrepreneurial capitalism, and deposited to reflower on Vancouver's fertile, but largely untilled, suburban soil. Rather than the pastoral Eden of a pre-industrial countryside, "the originative" site is Hong Kong, the original man is Chinese, and the origins of civilization are urban capitalism.

In this case, the reworking of a roots narrative by Hong Kong businessmen clearly disrupts normative cultural meanings in Vancouver. At the same time, however, it functions as a smooth supplement to an ideology of free trade and free markets. The counternarrative of roots is one that is associated with a narrative of transplanted capitalism; thus the new "inter" national spaces of a "transnational culture" produce the new rooted spaces of capital accumulation.

Other examples of the interconnections between cultural interventions and the furthering of economic ideologies are numerous. Methods of combatting the growing racial frictions in late 1980s Vancouver included the appropriation of 'positive' Orientalist representations of Chinese by wealthy Hong Kong-Canadian businessmen like Victor Li, Stanley Kwok and David Lam. One of the representations that was consistently promulgated was that of bridge-builder, a subject position inbetween nations— literally straddling the Pacific Ocean. Stanley Kwok, the architect for the Vancouver mega-project undertaken by Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing, for example, was recruited by Li to "make Pacific Place happen and, not incidentally, to build bridges between Concord and Vancouver's business establishment." The Vancouver Finance Minister said of Kwok, "Stanley is a terrific bridge between the Chinese and Canadian business communities. He bridges it well and he brings them together, and that's very important"(Quoted in the Globe and Mail, 1992).

In his discussion of the concept of ambivalence, Bhabha also uses the bridge as a metaphor of ambivalent articulation. In countering the idea of the nation as timeless territory, one whose traditions are separate and autonomous, the bridge is conceptualized as a progressive space inbetween. Bhabha writes, quoting Heidegger:

Here it seems that the bridge metaphor is one of potentially resistant ambivalence. Yet the metaphoric bridges that were discussed by the Finance Minister, Grace McCarthy, in 1992, were heralded because of their potential to join international capitalisms. Those hybrid Chinese-Canadians serving in the position as cultural bridges between communities were celebrated for their ability to further Vancouver's integration into the networks of the global economy, not for their ability to intervene in dominant national narratives. Furthermore, the appropriation of the bridge metaphor has occurred not just from within the western business community and Canadian government, but also from many of the "hybrid" Chinese businessmen themselves. Strategic appropriations of terms and concepts such as "bridgebuilder" have enabled businessmen to colonize the intermediary position between nations and cultures and to operate as the irreplaceable mediating figures of both commerce and culture.

In Vancouver, for example, other orientalist and self-essentializing representations such as the "model minority" and the "global economic subject" have been made alongside fervent proclamations of cultural Canadianness. Although the ongoing production of orientalism has always required the complicity of Asian elites to some extent (see, eg. Dirlik, 1996), the contemporary tensions between the increasingly unconstricted movements of capital and culture, and the boundaries, institutions and myths of the nation-state have perhaps made the current moment particularly salient for this type of strategic orientalizing. As Dirlik has argued, "culturalist essentialism, regardless of its origins in the state or with intellectuals, serves to contain and to control the disruptive consequences of globalization. This helps explain the simultaneous appearance of cultural nationalism with calls for economic globalization" (1996: 115). In this sense, the favorable projection of model-minority, hybrid, Chinese-Canadian bridgebuilders by both Canadian government officials and Chinese-Canadian businessmen themselves serves to advance the idea of "multiculturalism" as a national value-system and ideological force at the same time that it furthers capitalist integration. This is similar to the move in some Asian societies such as Singapore and Malaysia, of advancing Confucianism as the source of both national ethics and economic success.

In Vancouver in the 1980s, the orientalist coding of the Chinese model minority and economic middleman was advanced as a kind of counternarrative to the exclusive framing of local knowledge and cultural citizenship such as were manifest in the various struggles over monster houses and the removal of trees. This positioning was promulgated in Vancouver during a period of great upheaval and racial conflict in the city following the purchase of a large chunk of downtown real estate by the Hong Kong developer, Li Ka-shing. During this period, Li's son, Victor Li, held several interviews with local and national newspapers in which he declared himself a "good Canadian" and his company, "a good blue-chip Canadian company" (Quoted in Financial Post, 1989). Li's attempts to position himself in a site inbetween the narratives of the model minority and the acculturated Canadian citizen occurred at a time of increasing capital connections between Hong Kong and Vancouver.

Clearly, the ultimate flexibility of this self-fashioning process is useful in the contemporary global economy. As capitalist networks articulate, Chinese businessmen who speak the language of the global economic subject, but are also imbricated in a Hong Kong Chinese discourse, are able to operate as the quintessential hybridized middlemen (Ong, 1993; 1996). With flexible citizenship and deterritorialized systems of credit, but with a durable and elastic business network established on the basis of the extended family (see Mitchell, 1995), overseas Hong Kong Chinese capitalists can manipulate images of both the transnational, transcultural cosmopolitan and the 'ethnic Chinese', enabling them to position themselves on the margins of the nation, but at the lucrative center of Pacific Rim business.

In conclusion, I suggest that the contemporary celebration of the disruptive qualities of diasporic identity, hybridity, and third spaces is premature. Although there is clearly the potential for resistance to hegemonic narratives of nation and race in these positionings, there is also the potential for collaboration in the hegemonic narratives of capitalism. Inbetween spaces and subject positions are produced in the context of economic as well as cultural processes and must be theorized in tandem. Theories which privilege the cultural spaces of the nation, and which continually render those spaces abstract, may neglect the actual geographies of capital accumulation in which those spaces are produced. Furthermore, the decontextualized use of terms such as hybridity and diaspora, which in theory provide exciting disruptions of national and cultural narratives, in practice can be and are often appropriated for projects furthering various economic agendas. It is the fetishization of these terms that allow for their quick appropriation; in order to ensure more progressive meanings the concepts must be historically and geographically located. This type of theorizing, one which is embedded in specific histories and maps, enables a richer comparative understanding of processes and events, and avoids the kinds of slippages and abstract spatial metaphors so common to literary criticism and cultural studies.

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