This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
I have striven to embrace the contradictions that are road signs of the performative text. This is the site that Aoki (personal communication, September 1996, as cited in Beck, Ilieva, Sholefieldo, & Waterstone, 2007) described as not being “here or there” but “here and there,” and also not “this or that” but “this and that.” This is “tensioned space of both ‘and/not-and’, a space of conjoining and disrupting, indeed, a generative space of possibilities, a space wherein in tensioned ambiguity newness emerges” (Aoki, cited by Pinar, 2005, p. 53). This is a space of Zen that, as D. G. Smith (1999) described, “[i]n spite of everything, the whole remains whole, teeming with fluid ambiguity, but never without integrity” (p. 465). This is an interactive site for untranslatable texts, whereas Nishizawa (2002) articulated, “[T]he author becomes a function of discourse” (p. 15). When I began to write this book, I expected that I would write in a new and somewhat unique narrative style “which enables other positions to emerge” (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211), neither Western nor Japanese, while both Western and Japanese. This is a very messy and doubling text in the style of other texts that Low and Palulis (2004) have described as being “a living pedagogy that is always already inbetween movements of translation and transformation” (p. 1). My location is especially close to that of Trinh T. Minhha and Wang, as we share a similar Asian social identity. At the same time, however, I reject ethnocentric labeling. I also find myself engaging in the philosophy of postmodern thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault, because I believe that this world is contextually and discursively constructed. Trinh T. Minhha (1999b) talked with Bhabha about the culture: