Abstract
How shall we understand the signified "community" as in a Pacific Community? Conventional understanding of "community" privileges community understood as diversity, a collective of multiple identifiers of cultures and nations (as in multiculturalism or multinationalism). Postcolonialists, like Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, claim that such imaginary is inscribed in "democractic liberalism," suppressing, concealing, and containing the imaginary of "community as difference." In this article, the author calls upon readers to move boldly into the interspace midst these two imaginaries, and claims that though it is a site of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, it may be a site of generative possibilities and hope for newness, a site of becoming in struggle.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Barthes, R. (1982). The empire of signs. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd.
Berry, W. (1986). The unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Book Club.
Bhabha, H. (1990). The third space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207–221). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Bhabha, H. (1994). Location of culture. London: Routledge.
Chow, R. (1993). Writing diaspora: Tactics of intervention in contemporary studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Miyoshi, M. (1991). Off/center: Power and culture relations between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nishitani, K. (1982). Religion and nothingness. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The malaise of modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi Press.
Trinh M.-h. (1992). Woman native other. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Willinsky, J. (1994). Empire of words: The reign of the OED. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Young, R. (1990). White mythologies. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Aoki, T.T. In the Midst of Doubled Imaginaries: The Pacific Community as Diversity and as Difference. Interchange 30, 27–38 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007543725559
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007543725559