Discussing Concepts of Cross-Cultural Communication

 

For October 13th, we read and discussed “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts” by Ofelia Schutte. 

Published in 1998, “Cultural Alterity” draws on postcolonial feminist theory and phenomenological ontology to propose methods for embracing rather than obscuring incommensurabilities in dialogues across gendered and racialized hierarchies, particularly those in the academic contexts in the USA. Schutte concludes that alterity is productive, and incommensurability needs to be maintained in cross-cultural dialogues. To do this, Schutte proposes postcolonial feminist frameworks as a mode of communication that tracks difference without dispelling or attempting to resolve that difference.

Implicit questions that Schutte raises are: What distinction is there between the dominant position and that of the subaltern? To what extent are these two terms overlapping, relational, or non-essential? In a condition of sameness, how does alterity emerge? Is the burden on marginalized others to unsettle normative, dominant identities?

Our discussion of the text began with a clarification of terms, namely, how Schutte was using the idea of “the split self.” We talked about the psychoanalytical, postcolonial, and feminist theory implications of this term, which led to a conversation about the stakes of Schutte’s argument. That is, what are the consequences of listening? Is it possible? Since the burden of the split in colonial contexts is imposed on colonized others by the dominant group/discourse, a conversation that decenters and splits the dominant position remains uneven. 

Such persisting colonial hierarchies turned the conversation toward the material stakes of tensions and contradictions between ethics and politics. Philosophies of ethics upon which Schutte draws (e.g., Habermas and Levinas) obscure some of the material and political implications of cross-cultural dialogue. Group members pointed out how ethics examines how the split is happening and establishing the Self and Other but does not give us the conditions as to why this split exists in ways that perhaps Foucault would offer. Oppression only ends with the change to social reality and not through communication. 

Building on this, questions of larger social realities and their material implications also came up for discussion, particularly in how European philosophy is often more ethical than political. We talked about how ethical questions implicitly invoke Euro-centric forms of humanism, materialism, and modernity to discuss colonial contexts. Group members noted how the ethical question thus posits an implicitly white, western subject as needing to become cognizant of how different colonial projects independently create the many outsides writers are imply in theoretical texts.

The conversation concluded with questioning Schutte’s understanding of solidarity and how we can critically position philosophical traditions in our own readings of various theoretical texts on postcolonial or decolonial methodologies. We finished by discussing what to read next week. We’ll continue discussing communication by reading Gabriela Veronelli’s “A Colonial Approach to Theorizing Decolonial Communication” for October 20th.