Normativa en el sector de la floricultura

(Dis)Owning My Places

Countless people are traveling, migrating, and living globally for various reasons in starkly different conditions, disrupting, negotiating, and reinforcing the linkage of cultures, peoples, identities, nations, and specific places. Along with these people, flowing are capital, markets, technologies, and cultures. In its most general sense, this increasing global movement of capital, images, ideas, and people characterizes the word “globalization.”As Torgovnick states, this is the postmodern, with its “poly- glot, syncretic nature, its hodgepodge of the indigenous and the imported, the native and the foreign” (cited in Kelsky, 1996, p. 47). My traveling narrative starts from this point, noting how these enormous flows inextricably complicate every sphere of our lives. In this movement, I recognize my privileged location as a marginal/migrant intellectual who could afford to travel whether in class/educational aspiration or in desire to flee from the living conditions I could not bear anymore.

At the inception of my research project, I wrote:

she can’t celebrate korea ragewrathresentment i am living in my body

rooted, membered, nurtured in korea

can’t insult it humiliation, alienation, indignation,

she can’t identify with the “West” learned desire,

lived power, the west can’t reject it

impure, guilty, not innocent inauthentic native,

almost like us but not, alien

My research tale comes from this very ambivalent location where I fail or succeed both denunciation and acclamation of my transnational identities. As a migrant academic from Korea,1_{whose modern history is bruised by Japanese coloniza-}

tion and U.S. neo-imperial domination,2_{the routes I have been traveling to be a}

researcher—or “educated properly to create knowledge”—are messy (Rhee, 2006). I find no name for myself from off-the-shelf positionalities when I am demanded to work through multiple transnational discourses of identities, gender, race, colonial/imperial histories, and education.

Therefore, in this narrative, I perform the still necessary enunciation of an unrecognized specificity as a traveling korean woman researcher in the field of U.S. education, “neither as a cultural type nor as a unique individual” (Clifford, 1997, p. 23). At this unrecognized specificity, I am systematically erased from representation in mainstream discursive practice as I get more and more specifi- cally situated—other than being the Other (Kondo, 1996). My mode of being is unrecognizable. Kondo (1996) acutely points out this:

In very real ways, we do not exist. Either we are absent entirely or what is often worse, when we are depicted, it is only in the most stereotyped way, thus subjecting us to psychological violence rather than offering affirmation or recognition.

(p. 110)

What does my discussion on representation practices, identities, and historical contexts have to do with research? Researchers bring our own life stories and identities into our research projects as we develop the ideas of why, what, and how we should study a certain topic, population, and phenomenon. In order to under- stand how research is never an objective, value-free scientific inquiry, I argue that researchers ought to examine how we formulate our specific research questions (Kincheloe, 2003). What directs us to ask particular research questions? What happens when our research ideas do not “fit” to existing languages or frameworks? How do we negotiate to register our “inappropriate” questions, ideas, and projects in the legitimate realm of academic discourse? This chapter engages with these questions by tracing my struggles as a foreign doctoral student who worked to carry out a research project that could not be easily named, partly because, in dominant academic discourse, I did not exist in very real ways. Consequently, this chapter is not really about my experiences as a researcher in fieldwork. But it addresses how my own personal positionality in relation to the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) directed my methods of questioning as I tried to examine

particular educational issues and phenomenon (Kincheloe, 2003, p. 92). Our everyday mundane life is not irrelevant to the issues and discussions of research methodologies. This narrative of how “subjective-personal I” was used to imagine and conduct my dissertation research will demonstrate what has been left out of hegemonic research practice and thus what still remains to be named, seen and heard in contemporary U.S. educational research.

Within postcolonial critique, my narrative constitutes native research tales of encounters between “we,” the natives, and “they,” the natives, using Trinh’s (1989) terms, “here” in the West. Trinh states, “Terming us the ‘natives’ focuses on

our innate qualities and belonging to a particular place by birth; terming them the

‘natives’ focuses on their being born inferior and ‘non-Europeans’” (italic original, p. 52). Ruptures and merging of these two “natives” “here” in the West, where Knowledge is constructed, validated, and reconfigured, have racialized, ethnicised, exoticized, and savaged the allegedly homogeneous and safe West. Now, “they,” the inferior natives—for me “they” become we—refuse and resist remaining as the unitary and distinguishable Other. They now even claim their coeval subjectivities and authorities as knowers (Gupta & Ferguson 1997a, 1997b; Lavie & Swedenburg, 1996). Because I write this story as one of them, whose wrongful presence here makes the natives by birth here uncomfortable, the signifier “they” and “we” and the signified “they” and “we” are displaced and replaced from this point. If an anthropologist had the legitimacy to represent a foreign culture by living full time in the village, learning the language, and being a seriously involved participant– observer (Clifford, 1997, p. 20), my traveling tale of the U.S. academic research village should establish ethnographic authority. In this way, this chapter unsettles the dominant paradigm of ethnography in which local natives’ supposed enchantment, tradition, culture, and simplicity are contrasted with the mobile ethnographer’s enlightenment, modernity, science, and development (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997a, p. 9).

Yet my argument is not that “we” and “they” are very separable categorical entities whose borders are clean and clear. It is not what I try to argue for. In fact, that is what I try to argue against. Trinh (1989) states, “These two natives sometimes claim to merge and other times hear nothing of each other” (p. 52). After all, I am a part of the U.S./Western academy. I am living in both us and them simultaneously.

(Alien) Traveling Subjectivities

Faced with the fatal notion of a self-contained European culture and the absurd notion of an uncontaminated culture in a single country, T. S. Eliot writes, “We are therefore pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture, while admitting it is something we cannot imagine. We can only conceive it as the logical term of the relations between cultures.” The fatality of thinking of “local” cultures as uncontaminated or self-contained forces us to conceive of “global” cultures, which itself remains unimaginable. What kind of logic is this?

As a traveling korean woman dwelling in the U.S., I hear from time to time that I am “migukmul mo˘ken yo˘ja— ,” literally translated as “a woman who drank U.S. water,” implying that I have been Westernized through “living” in the U.S. culture, territory, or nation-state. After many times, I consider this is an Othering practice exercised from my own cultural/national group to deauthorize my koreanness. My difference, deviance, and contest against the domination exercised in the name of the Korean, then, are attributed to my tainted korean- ness as migukmul mo˘ken yo˘ja— —and dismissed easily as irrelevant and illegitimate within Korean nationalistic discourse. As U. Narayan (1997) suggests, I occupy a suspect location of a U.S. university sanctioned researcher and my perspectives are suspiciously tainted and problematic products of our “Westernization.” So, are my criticisms of my Korean cultures merely one more incarnation of a colonized consciousness, meaning the views of “privileged native women in whiteface,” seeking to attack my “non-Western culture” on the basis of “Western” values (U. Narayan, 1997, p. 3)?

Despite my status as less Korean, particularly within Korean cultural nationalist discourse, the identity of korean woman for me becomes the most important strategic site of multiple struggles to resist and fight back against various forms of Western imperial domination—ironically as the amount of U.S. water I have been drinking increases. At the same time, however, I often desire to re/sign3_this

very sign “Korean women” because of its reflection of a controlling, patriarchal regime built and maintained for a long historical period over the women who need and want to identify with the sign, Korean women in this world.

This internal conflict, tension, and fragmentation gets messier as the co- occurrence of my incessant yearning for home, “korea,” and my continuous living here at home, “u.s.,” forces me to reconfigure the presumed distance of Korea and the U.S. Is my traveling to return or to stay? Even at this moment (unfortunately), I feel urged to acknowledge that my claim for being at home in the U.S. may make some people irritated because I am defined as an “alien,” legally, in U.S. territory. So, my claim for home in the U.S. as an alien may sound like an alien invasion to non-aliens!

One typical spring day in 1999, I was walking on the street in my campus area. Passing by, a white man said to me, “It’s time Chinese people went home.” I am not Chinese but I was Chinese at that moment because I knew that the word “Chinese” included me regardless of my ethnicity and nationality as well as despite my collective memory as a Korean woman of Chinese imperialism toward Korea. He was talking to me as a Chinese, an Oriental native. “Chinese, go home.” I could not pretend that I had nothing to do with what he said, because my frequent travels to this white/Western world allowed me to understand how I am constructed in it (see Lugones, 1987).

As an alien woman of color, I travel every day to the mainstream white organization of life in the U.S. This practice of travel subverts and complicates the dominant concepts of travel, which Clifford (1997) defines as more or less voluntary practices of leaving “home” to go to some “other” place for the purpose of gain—material, spiritual, scientific. Lugones (1987) articulates:

As outsiders to the U.S. mainstream, women of color practice “world” traveling, mostly out of necessity. I affirm this practice as a skillful, creative, rich, enriching, and, given certain circumstances, as a loving way of being and living. I recognize that we do much of our traveling, in some sense against our wills, to hostile White/Anglo “worlds.” The hostility of these “worlds” and the compulsory nature of the “traveling” have obscured for us the enormous value of this aspect of our living and its connection to loving. Racism has a vested interest in obscuring and devaluing the complex skills involved in this. (p. 390) Through this almost compulsory traveling, I have learned that the West, the U.S. or America(s) is not a homogeneous space inhabited by authentic insiders. I have met people who are living in the West but cannot and do not claim themselves as and/ or within the West. I may be identified as migukmul mo˘ken yo˘ja— , an illegitimate korean woman who is Westernized in Korean nationalistic cultural discourse. Yet here in the West, I am designated as Chinese, and someone who should go back home. In world traveling, I learn to relate myself to the categorized, defined, and reduced constructs of me in a certain world. I also learn to unlearn the categorized, defined, and reduced me to claim myself in another world. Now, I see these worlds are connected through me. As others claim their home in homelessness, I as a traveling woman finally come to claim home through

traveling-in-dwelling and dwelling-in-traveling (Clifford, 1997), but in different

modes at different intersections of history and power. My resistance against and desire for home(s) grow together.

Methodological Policing

Research “through imperial eyes” describes an approach which assumes that Western ideas about the most fundamental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only rational ideas, and the only idea which can make sense of the world, of reality, of social life and of human beings. It is an approach to indigenous peoples which still conveys a sense of innate superiority and an overabundance of desire to bring progress into the lives of indigenous peoples—spiritually, intellectually, socially, and economically. It is research which from indigenous perspectives “steals” knowledge from others and then uses it to benefit the people who “stole” it. Some indigenous and minority group research would call this approach simply racist. It is research which is imbued with an “attitude” and a “spirit” which assumes a certain ownership of the entire world, and which has established systems and forms of governance which embed that attitude in institutional practices. These practices determine what counts as legitimate research and who count as legitimate researchers.

(Smith, 1999, p. 56) The way I frame “research” corresponds with Smith’s notion (1999) that “scientific research is implicated in the worst excess of colonialism. . . . Research is not an

innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions” (pp. 1–3). As Trinh (1989) indicates, “‘discourse’, ‘law’, ‘order’, ‘generalization’, or ‘consistency’—what he [a researcher] values and looks for is, fortunately, what he always only finds” (p. 56). What have we been looking for in our research?

As a response to this much-debated question, I resist my academic authority that allows me, as long as I write and speak the right language, to have God’s grasp

of the totality (see Trinh, 1989, 1993) in this world. It is very tempting to let the

dominant discourse of ethnographer/researcher co-opt me to be a knowledge colonizer, in ways that ignore, deny, and erase my own struggle as an alien woman of color against subjugation and marginalization (Villenas, 1996). Should I mimic (imperial) science of research to establish the legitimacy and authority of myself as a researcher? Kincheloe (2003) argues:

[O]bjectivist traditional science provides a shelter in which the self can hide from the deeply personal issues which permeate all socio-educational phenomena. Such personal issues would, if it were not for the depersonal- ization of traditional inquiry, force an uncomfortable element of researcher self-revelation.

(p. 69)

Instead, I reuse the space I am thrown into, a space that has been used by so many types of hegemonies at once: a heterosexual woman of color, postcolonial, asian, from four tigers, diaspora, immigrant, third world woman, korean, intellectual, etc. Paradoxically this has been a shared space for building strategic alliances, not to force all fragments to cohere into a seamless narrative but to communicate different meanings of historical and structural subordinations for different individuals and groups.

In this travel, for instance, as a third world woman of color I was able to observe that my long-time positionality, foreign or international student, highlighted my alien position through my different nationality from U.S. citizens, especially people of color, through a binary opposition of domestic vs. foreign. Another binary illusion: we, Americans, and the Others, the rest of the world. This differentiation between and homogenization within effaces unnegotiable differences among so-called foreign students in U.S. higher education. A strong symptomatic case is the continuous and relentless stigmatization of foreign students’ English profi- ciency as the problem of foreign students, which naturalizes the monolithism of U.S. Anglo-English hegemony when much of the world is more than bilingual and the U.S. is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking country. If the issue is truly about communication and literacy, why is it not uncommon to hear that some accents such as French, German, and Russian are cultural while other accents such as Chinese and Nigerian obstruct their communication efficiency? The foreign does not invoke the same xenophobia. Moreover, the naturalized term “international student” depoliticized my position by heightening my inter-national status to the U.S. nation-state, sending a message that I was an outsider who should not meddle

with inside affairs such as racism, as if I had nothing to do with all different types of domination of/in the U.S. In turn, representation of foreign students (of color) as the absolute Other to the U.S. nation-state in U.S. higher education practices and discourse buttresses the fiction of U.S. nationalism which naturalizes the hege- mony of one, eurocentric, collectivity and its access to the ideological apparatuses of both state and civil society (Rhee & Sagaria, 2004). This naturalization is at the roots of the inherent connection that exists between nationalism and racism. Even when U.S. nationalism constructs its own racialized minorities into the assumed deviants from the normal and excludes them from important power resources, othering foreigners (of color) promotes the myth of equal citizenship through one collectivity in this nation-state (Yuval-Davis, 1997, p. 11). For example, who are more insulted, degraded, and functionally degraded through the learning inculcated by the current U.S. (higher) education institution as a whole, European international students or American Indians, for instance (see Churchill, 1995)? The myth of equal citizenship, one collectivity, and nationalism needs to be more critically examined.

In a similar vein, I find that discourses of culture continuously freeze, normalize, and police our traveling practices. Voices of the Others are still contained in stable, definable, and essentialized cultural/national frameworks instead of inciting the idea that culture is never a sealed room with a homogeneous space inside it, inhabited by authentic insiders (U. Narayan, 1997, p. 33; see also Bhabha, 1994; Chow, 1993; Koptiuch, 1996). According to Nanda (1987), culture describes the specifically human type of learned behavior in which arbitrary rules and norms are so important. Stated differently, “Culture as a system of norms, meanings and expectations does limit human behavior both by channeling it in culturally approved directions and by punishing known violations” (p. 57). Who gets to define the systems of norms, meanings, and expectations—culture—for what purpose and by what authority? Who accumulates benefits through these systems which constitute culture? Or at least, how do differently positioned people in a culture experience it differently? What happens when some of its members contest their entitled culture? Without much paying attention to these politicized ques- tions in regard to the constructions and power dynamics of cultures, the world of dominant U.S. educational research discourse still operates through essentialistic binary oppositions like black vs. white culture, western vs. oriental, feminine vs. masculine, colonizer vs. colonized, etc.—each contained and uncontaminated with the same hierarchical dualities of center/margin.

This is methodological policing. Under this way of studying, talking, and thinking, even if some of us may already have acted out our hybrid, multiple, and fractured cultural identities, the boundaries of categories, particularly binary opposition, are easily policed. McDermott (1997) explicates:

As U.S. citizens, we are invited to ask what Jews, African Americans, Vietnamese and Hispanic Americans look like and how they behave. Sometimes we are invited to know how their behavior explains their position inside U.S. social structure, and stereotypes are available to guide our

explanations. Only rarely are we invited to understand the condition for a group being recognized, stereotyped, analyzed, and condemned. Only rarely are we invited to examine the role of mainstream bias in the organization of borders, stereotypes, and the social structure outcomes that maintain the borders.

(p. 116)

As knowledge producers who have the power to do battle about the status of truth—epistemology (see Foucault, 1984)—intellectuals within Eurocentric epistemology have narrated only a certain type of culture where only a certain type