“Experimental ethnography has undermined not only the authority of the white male heterosexual subject but also the authority of the author”
Page duBois, Sowing the Body
“The author? Who is he, who am I?
Admirably called, the subject, prudish or terrified, crouches, hides, throws itself behind or under the succession of clothes, thrown under the capes and cloaks, impossible to place as an Harlequin”
Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit
In The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha explores the experience of the limit and, at the same time, of the metropolis, where one has to deal with the post-colonial history, narrated not only by hegemonic and orientalist discourse but also in the flow of migrants and refugees coming out of different conflicts – also mentioned in Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. In the post-colonial city, excluded orients have penetrated, and silent or silenced peoples speak in their own way, with their words, often mixed with those of the Westerners. Migrants and refugees, second and third generation immigrants who populate the “banlieu” – Bhabha, like Walter Benjamin, wants to tell the story of these oppressed, these orients, these fragments that do not have to be brought back to an orientalist hegemonic discourse. Bhabha’s book, which references both Benjamin and Edward Said, is particularly important because it analyses how the “western sign” still establishes “colonial [and post-colonial] significance”. Those western signs are maps of misunderstandings that confuse registration with rightful government, that for academic and mainstream discourses is the one of biopolitical governance.
But enunciation is always split. The English’ civil discourse of the late nineteenth century is separated from colonial violence, the homogeneous and empty time (Benjamin) of colonialists who tell the “magnifiche e sorti progressive” (Leopardi) does not coincide with that of the colonized people who live a time of misery and oppression, one which is schizophrenic, shattered between ancient or archaic rituals and modern and capitalist timing and often their strange fusion, once again, as shown by Jean Rouch’s ethnographic film Les maitres fous (1955), subjecting and subjectivating the colonized instead of emancipating them, or capturing them in that phenomenon that Bhabha calls “mimicry”. In this sense, the post-colonial perspective reminds us that cultures are transnational processes made of migration, diaspora, exile, and re-establishment and that cultural identities do not exist. Tradition, even that of the oppressed, should not be preserved or claimed in its essence; if anything it should be de-essentialized – as Said taught – and, as T.J. Demos suggests, it’s linked with and grafted onto a cartography of “radical futurisms” and in a tentacular strategy of practical-theoretical interventions both “from below” and “networked”. This mixture is increasingly the expression of that “upsetting” condition which is the Chthulucene and makes us – or must make us aware of – the historical, manufactured, hybrid, becoming character of culture, the invention of tradition and genres, even those of cinema. Post-colonial thought strives to elaborate a project that assumes the complexity of cultural and political boundaries, intertwined borders, in a multidisciplinary perspective, questioning the locations in which hegemonic discourses and values are produced.
The locations of post-colonial culture challenge the peaceful idea of a national homogeneous culture: they argue against the notion of a consensual and linear transmission of culture. This is what emerges in the famous novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. What is at stake in the book is a new feminism, expressed in an emancipatory literature that in the novel painfully clusters around the figure of a slave, Sethe. The body of the nation is mixed and hybrid, and the birth of a nation, like that of the United States, is complex and contradictory. Baby Sugs, one of the slaves in the novel, exclaims: “I’m in pieces.” Once freed, she asks herself, – redeemed by the work of her son who will have to stay tied to his master forever – if her hands really belong to her. Even Beloved feels as if she is flying in a thousand pieces, as if pieces of her body are detached, as if she’s exploding. Only the contact with fingers, fingers behind the neck, of others’ hands, hands that caress and touch, this alone holds her together. Even the runaway slave Paul D. cries “because he has no self”. Distance from home is a theme that runs through the novel Beloved. And even at home, in the house under siege, where Whites could always break through, the house that holds on to ghosts and past violence, even there, at home, they feel disoriented. Beloved’s house is unsettling, inhabited by ghosts, it’s foreign. Bhabha, referencing Freud’s Unheimlich, speaks of an “estrangement of the domestic”. Infanticide is the phantasmic and perhaps literary repetition of the violence suffered by black children. Entering the story and discovering the historical dimension, the social and political roots of that violence, we readers, as Bhabha points out, are left with no choice but to shift our judgment on the mother who killed her children to keep them from slavery.
Distance also marks La noire de . . . (1966), the work of the Senegalese filmmaker, writer and activist – and one of the founders of African cinema – Ousmane Sembène: LFU will devote to his works a special dossier in the next issue. The protagonist, a young Senegalese woman who is looking for work, leaves her country and, in the segregation of the closed spaces of an apartment on the French Riviera – where she cooks and cleans – relives the subjugation and humiliation of colonial servitude, despite the formal liberation of her country and the apparently “free” choice to migrate to France. Right in the house – whose closed spaces clash with the open ones of Senegal – the young woman feels more and more lost, estranged, foreign and divided. In this French house of the middle bourgeoisie, colonial servitude is rewritten in the form of wage and cultural dependence.
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Post-colonial thought is an act of cultural translation that works a continuous transformation, calling upon the the larger history of languages and the passages of migration and diaspora. Think of Derek Walcott’s poems. Thinking and rethinking, deconstructing classicism and making difference echo in repetition is a scriptural operation, an écriture. The concept of “writing” (écriture) has always been interpreted as “signifier of the signifier”: as a translation of the voice which in turn translates the signs of the soul (meaning). With Jacques Derrida, écriture begins to include language. Écriture is not only an auxiliary means at the service of the voice and then of science. The origin of “writing” is the origin of language. Écriture is not to put in the work this or that, the truth, the foundation, the origin and so on. It is to put into action, a continuously deferred trace of différance, that is, of differentiation and deferment. Lang and Walsh’s écriture in Bogdanovich’s, theirs in ours (readers, viewers, critics…). Once again, the stakes are those of the subject, of subjectivation, of the hybridization processes that mix and fluidify not only the discourses of identity but also the dialectic between genre and style, convention and signature, discourse and authorship, hybridization and generation. Mixed bodies.
To read what has never been written, to put the institution back in motion, to subtract tradition from conformism – as Benjamin suggested – has always been the vocation of this journal. As Michel Serres would say: write texts of which you are not the author. To think of a new subjectivity (agency) that invades the human and nonhuman, and also, why not, starting from the old querelle about authorship/discourse, or signature/system. Is Lang an author? And Walsh isn’t? It’s obvious that we are beyond all this. No, Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994) was wrong when he wrote that the “I” is the only method. (And he was quite wrong about Virginia Woolf too…). As Derrida wrote: you need to be many to write and also to perceive. Whoever writes “I” has always already been crossed and forged by this otherness. Donna Haraway observes – and alongside her Lynn Margulis, Karen Barad, contemporary biology, physics, and social life too… – subjects, objects, things, genders, species, etc., are all the result of their inter-action – of course, even Marx had this idea (see General Intellect). Language, writes Haraway, more than devotion, is deviation, stumbling, continuous remodeling, just like our apparent and illusory “identities” – more like differences – or like Walsh and Lang’s images, reshaped and altered by Bogdanovich’s metaplasmós.
Toni D’Angela
Translated by Elisa Mancioli
Revision by Will Straw