Beyond Border Politics: The Problematics of Identity in Asian Diaspora Literature‪.‬

The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes solidarity and connection there. But there is not necessarily a single place or an exclusivist nation.--James Clifford In the history of human civilization, the question of identity is usually tied to the politics of place. As Gaston Bachelard notes, the idea of self stands in close relation to the passion for place--"topophilia" (8); or in other words, the sense of place has essential significance in the understanding of human identity. Place, however, is not a stable concept, for the notion of place as a bordered realm or a narrowly defined point in space is obviously inadequate to describe modern diaspora in which place has been displaced and opened up to an undelimited system of spacing. Against Bachelard's topoanalysis, scholars in recent years start to reconsider place in a new perspective. As Edward Casey observes, "As deeply localized, nomad space always occurs as a place--in this place. But as undelimited, it is a special kind of place. It is a place that is not just here, in a pinpointed spot of space, but in a 'nonlimited locality'" (304). Diasporans, in the process of crossing and recrossing multiple borders of language, history, race, time and culture, must challenge the absolutism of singular place by relocating the trajectory of their identity in the multiplicity of plural interrelationships. Nonlimited locality, in other words, does not mean the disappearance of borders, but rather it suggests the complexity and changing meanings of place between and beyond various outside and inside borders. Owing to their shared experience of mobility, Asian diaspora poetry in America expresses a paradoxical attitude towards the question of borders which, for them, are at once barriers and bridges.