othering rather than an acknowledgment of real differences. Consequently, Eastern Europe can now be treated in American discourse as an oppressed and wronged culture. And it is, perhaps, precisely because we still think of it as slightly different (in that vaguely negative sense) that we feel we need to acknowledge it, to give it prominence and visibility.
In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change (Kuhn 64).
It also produces a lot of good, precise information. As it was said before, even the resistance to change is, according to Kuhn, useful. It “guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core” (65).
I believe one can easily argue that the cultural diversity paradigm is still at a stage where normal science is quite in order. It is a relatively new paradigm, only entering the stage of professionalization, with a lot of blank spaces yet to be filled. Learning more about, and restoring visibility and legitimacy to, different cultural groups whose difference has been covered over by the previous paradigm is both politically and scholastically useful. Within this paradigm, then, a perfectly justified desire to internationalize and interculturalize the curriculum and campus life has led, at Bowling Green and elsewhere, to an increased inclusion of other cultures/countries into both course syllabi and campus events. As a result (as was said at the beginning of this essay), I had been asked to speak about Yugoslavia even before the country had grabbed the world’s attention by disintegrating into the chaos of war. I have been asked to comment on leisure in Yugoslavia, women in Yugoslavia, popular culture in Yugoslavia. In other words, I was given visibility and attention which I most likely would not have enjoyed under other paradigms. Why, then, the unease?
For a number of reasons, most of which have already been noted and analyzed by members of other cultural groups who have gone through similar experiences.
1. At the simplest level, it is a common dilemma: on the one hand, I wanted my difference acknowledged; on the other, however, “difference” often implied an inferiority in the eyes of the asker since to be “non-American” (more particularly, to be East European) was by many taken to automatically mean “worse than American.”
2. On a more complex level, speaking “as a Yugoslavian woman” could be seen as feeding a paradigm which my talk was supposed to question. I felt I was not contributing to my audience’s better understanding of the world, or, for that matter, to the development of scholarship. Gayatri Spivak (among others) suggests that some representatives of other cultures are token representatives. When an audience wants “to hear an Indian speaking as an Indian, a Third World woman speaking as a Third World woman, [writes Spivak], they cover over the fact of the ignorance that they are allowed to possess, into a kind of homogenization.”4 When I spoke “as a Yugoslavian woman” (particularly when what I said met — or could be interpreted to meet — the audience’s expectations) I became a token representative of both my imagined culturally pure and purely different group and an imagined proof of the audience’s openness toward difference and toward discourses of the “other.”
3. What my encounters with the First and the Second Worlds’ ideological spaces also show is Yugoslavia’s and my own semiotically unstable place within them. The First World considered me East European, the Second World considered me a Westerner. Although my meaning changed as I entered these ideological spaces, my structural position within them was vaguely similar: I was always identified as being — belonging to —“the other.” In both cases, the cultural/discursive spaces entered were more powerful (larger and politically and militarily stronger) than my place of origin (at that time, my country, Yugoslavia), so their reading of me (and by implication of my country) carried, so to speak, far more weight than my own reading of myself (and my country’s reading of itself).
The cold war could also, then, be seen as a war for classification of Yugoslavia. If the Eastern Bloc had won, Yugoslavia might have found itself classified as Western, and then, in retaliation (who knows?) been far more firmly united, all difference and decentering erased? Since, however, the West “won,” Yugoslavia finds itself in the position assigned to it by that discourse; it finds itself an Eastern European country. In other words, until recently semiotically unstable, Yugoslavia now finds itself fixed as Eastern Bloc. One could take this to clearly indicate at least one definition of the nature of the “fircond” world: the common space, rather than being negotiated among all participants, is defined in American terms. This indicates the victor’s prerogative to impose rules, in this case of discourse: it appears that the victors’ definition of the “fircond” world space (which now consists of both, the First and the Second Worlds) will apply from now on. Yugoslavia will be fixed as an Eastern Bloc country (which is the way it had been most commonly seen by the American popular discourse, but not by other discourses on the global stage).
And I, instead of performing on a common stage — created by the opening up to each other of Western and Eastern Blocs’ discourses (perhaps the image of one large room created out of two smaller ones by removal of a wall is a better one?) — am actually appearing on a stage which is controlled by the West. Furthermore, I am expected to assume on that stage an already designated place: to be different (specific to my region and culture, as well as to the political past of that region), but to relate my (different) experiences in the conceptual, linguistic, and stylistic categories offered, understandable, and expected by American audiences. And, by implication, I am also expected to walk through the door opened for me by (and into) the Western discourse, without changing that discourse.
So, when I speak as a Yugoslavian woman within the context of the Eastern Bloc, I also help legitimate the redefinition of Yugoslavia as an Eastern Bloc country. I represent and thereby participate in the American cold-war (re)definition of the “fircond” world, and, by the same token, attest to the international legitimacy, indeed, democratic inflection, of that (re)definition. In other words, by performing normal science within the cultural diversity paradigm I am also performing normal science within the cold-war paradigm.
4. And finally: in all of the above-described situations there is a lack of viable cultural space in which I (and other people like me, people with complex and nonlinear affiliations) can move, act, speak. I find most of the categories offered as vehicles of my visibility and identity to be limiting, oppressive, and stifling. This can partly be explained by historical circumstances: Yugoslavia has been semiotically unstable on the global stage, so any one affiliation or definition of it sounds simplistic and inaccurate; furthermore, since the country does not exist any more, Yugoslavian identity might appear fictional rather than real. In other words, both in the past and in the present, Yugoslavian identity appears to have been clearly something which is culturally constructed. But this historical explanation does not quite suffice. Today most scholars of culture believe that all cultural identities are constructed in one way or another. We are not dealing here with one constructed, “unauthentic” identity in the world of pure and authentic ones; rather, we are dealing with a world full of complex constructed identities. And it is precisely that world that the above categories do not seem to adequately address.
II
Cultural Categories as Objects of Study. There is an assumption, in the question about women in Yugoslavia, of the difference of Yugoslavian women which precedes any empirical information: it is deduced from the postulated radical difference between the two blocs which, in turn, is a result of the cold war. More specifically, it
