Cities of Others. Xiaojing Zhou
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“Otherness,” group identities, and social positions are constructed spatially, Massey’s and Sassen’s respective arguments about the politics of space offer new approaches to social formation and social change in spatial terms.
Grosz’s theories about space further advance our understanding of difference as transformative of identities, of social relations, and even of seemingly static space. Instead of dismissing binary categories as fixed, opposing attributes, Grosz explores in them the possibilities of a complex mutually constitutive and transformative process of becoming. Rereading Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Grosz points out the vital roles of difference in social, cultural change, which can mobilize “a constellation of transformations, an event that imperceptibly affects everything” (Nick of Time 26). Moreover, Grosz argues that space “is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action” (Architecture 116). As such, space can be “transformed according to the subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it” (Grosz, Space 122). From these perspectives, the possibilities of mutual transformation are embedded in the process of immigrants’ and minorities’ self-inventions and resistance to assimilation and exclusion, a process that is uncontainable to the margins but is transformative of American identity and culture.
To fully recognize the significance of the multiple ways in which Asian American writers deploy spatially bounded or mobilized narrative strategies, it is necessary to engage with theories about urban space in literary and cultural studies as well. A mutually constitutive relation between space and the subject is also embedded in the relation between the urban environment and the raced, gendered body. These relations underlie the theoretical perspectives on the city developed by literary and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, as well as by feminist critics like Grosz and Judith Walkowitz, among others. Benjamin’s study of modern urban literature in relation to the emergence of new urban spaces such as the arcades in Paris, which gave rise to the flâneur—the bourgeois city stroller and spectator—and to new genres of writing, including journalism and detective fiction, reveals an intricate connection between the production of space and the formation of identity and subjectivity. The fact that commercialized urban spaces in the nineteenth century became the sites of fieldwork for the flâneur figure, “who goes botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 36), suggests the constitutive role of space in identity and subjectivity formation. Most relevant to Cities of Others is Benjamin’s examination of the voyeuristic gaze of the flâneur, whose participatory observation in the city streets or the Parisian arcades as the writer, the poet, or the journalist parallels the “fieldwork” of the anthropologist or the ethnographer, a mode of production of knowledge about the “Other.” As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson states in her essay “The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris”: “Flânerie presupposes an urban epistemology” (30). Against the “potential unmanageability of the crowd” with increasing diversity resulting from demographic changes in postrevolutionary Paris, Ferguson contends, “[t]he flâneur domesticates the potentially disruptive urban environment” by reducing diversity to “a marvelous show” (31). Significantly, Ferguson considers flânerie a unique, privileged mode of knowledge production, a form of gendered power. “Like the narrator and like the detective,” the flâneur “is associated with knowledge” (31). While the “connection with authorship is telling in its exclusions” of women and the working class, flânerie is “key to urban control” (27, 32). Exploring further the mode of knowledge production underlying the connection between the flâneur and the journalist, and an affinity between the flâneur-journalist and social investigation, David Frisby in his essay “The Flâneur in Social Theory” contends that Benjamin “provides us with an analytic of flânerie that reveals potential affinities between this activity and the sociologist’s investigation of the social world” as shown in the significance of the city in works of sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Robert E. Park, Siegfried Kracauer, and others (Frisby 83, 89).
Rather than “urban control” or disciplinary knowledge about the “Other,” Shields in his essay “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie” relates the flâneur to the loss of control, to displacement, and situates flânerie in the context of nineteenth-century colonial empire. He observes that “[w] hile flânerie is an individual practice, it is part of a social process of inhabiting and appropriating urban space” (65). A “public and other-directed” practice in the metropolis, flânerie reveals “a changing ‘social spatialisation’ . . . of everyday social and economic relations” in nineteenth-century Paris, where “social encounters with strangers and foreigners . . . impinged on the life world of Europeans” (Shields 65, 67). However, Shields notes that Benjamin’s study of the flâneur leaves out “the popular European fascination not just with commodities but with distant cultures experienced through rubbing shoulders with foreigners.” (68). Drawing on Simmel’s (1950) sociological concept of “the Stranger” as an outsider who settles in the European city “as an insider who nonetheless maintains an outside status because of their [sic] difference,” Shields considers “the Stranger” “a counterpart” to the flâneur, an “urban native,” who “personifies the ideal-type of the citizen” (68, 61, 64). The encounters between “the Stranger” and the “urban native” are unsettling to both “foreigners” and citizens. As Shields contends: “The metropolis is a space in which both outsiders and insiders are ‘dis-placed.’ Neither are properly at home in the commodified spaces of the imperial metropolis” (68). In this case, Otherness is not comfortably reduced to spectacles by the flâneur’s gaze. Rather than being “domesticated,” the presence of the “outsiders” in the European metropolis disturbs the established social relations and homogeneous cultural and national identities.9 But social change required by the presence of the “outsiders,” Shields notes, “is elided in the escape” of the flâneur “into the fantasy world of the emporium” (77–78). Thus the “European encounter with the Other is postponed, as it has continued to be through the twentieth century” (Shields 78). Flânerie as a potential counter-discourse to “urban control” underlying Shields’s perspective on the mutual displacement of “outsiders” and “insiders” in the city is theorized by de Certeau in his examination of the politics of the everyday practice of space. In his study of the city, de Certeau proposes a rethinking of resistance to oppressive, dominant systems in terms of strategies of everyday-life activities, including walking the street, which can “privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements,” making interventions or alternative articulations emerge (98).
Further departing from Benjamin’s perspective on the relationship between the cityscape and the urban spectator, Grosz and Walkowitz in their respective writings call critical attention to the difference of the gendered body in the urban space. Grosz points out the mutually constitutive and transformative relation between the body and the urban environment. She argues that the city is “the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed.” Moreover, “the body must be considered active in the production and transformation of the city” (Space 108). Grosz’s argument alerts us to the implications and effects when the raced, gendered body is understood not as a passive reflection of innate identity attributes but rather as an active element in constituting, contesting, and transforming the environment of the city. Walkowitz’s study “City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London” offers a compelling example. Walkowitz contends that crossing “divided spaces of the metropolis” to “experience the city as a whole” establishes the privileged flâneur’s “right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged” (414–15). Yet “the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur” of the late nineteenth century “had become an unstable construct” challenged by “social forces” to be reworked and reconstructed (412). “No figure was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the structured public landscape of the male flaneur, than the woman in public,” who was “presumed to be both endangered and a source of danger to those men who congregated