Migrancy, Culture, Identity

Iain Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134881543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers unravels how our sense of place and identity is realised as we move through myriad languages, worlds and histories. The author explores the uncharted impact of cultural diversity on today's world, from the 'realistic' eye of the painter to the 'scientific' approach of the cultural anthropologist or the critical distance of the historian; from the computer screen to the Walkman and 'World Music'. Migrancy, Culture and Identity takes us on a journey into the disturbance and dislocation of culture and identity that faces all of us to explore how migration, marginality and homelessness have disrupted the West's faith in linear progress and rational thinking, undermining our knowledge, history and cultural identity.

1
AN IMPOSSIBLE HOMECOMING

If we rethink culture . . . in terms of travel, then the organic, naturalizing bias of the term culture – seen as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, etc. – is questioned. Constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view.

James Clifford¹

Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.

Martin Heidegger²

One day I recognised that what was more important for me than anything else was how I defined myself to the degree that I was a stranger . . . I then realised that, in his vulnerability, the stranger could only count on the hospitality that others could offer him. Just as words benefit from the hospitality the white page offers them or the bird from the unconditional space of the sky.

Edmond Jabès³

On southern Californian highways, around Tijuana close to the Mexican border, are road signs usually associated with the encounter of nature and culture: symbols of leaping deer or prowling bears that warn us to look out for them crossing the road. This time the icon is diverse, it refers to cross-cultural traffic. The graphic indicates people on foot. Desperate to escape the destiny of poverty, they cut or crawl through the border wire and, dodging the speeding automobiles, scamper across the concrete in a dash to flee from the past and in-state themselves in the promise of the North.

This desperate scene of hope, migration and attempted relocation is a fragment, invariably caught in a press photo, on the news, in a television documentary, in immigration statistics, that nevertheless illuminates much of the landscape we inhabit. When the ‘Third World’ is no longer maintained at a distance ‘out there’ but begins to appear ‘in here’, when the encounter between diverse cultures, histories, religions and languages no longer occurs along the peripheries, in the ‘contact zones’ as Mary Louise Pratt calls them, but emerges at the centre of our daily lives, in the cities and cultures of the so-called ‘advanced’, or ‘First’, world, then we can perhaps begin to talk of a significant interruption in the preceding sense of our own lives, cultures, languages and futures.⁴

This is not to say that London and Lagos are nowadays simply geographically separate urban centres held in the common syntax of the global metropolitan media. They may share certain goods, habits, styles and languages, but for each thing in common there is also a corresponding local twist, inflection, idiolect. They are not merely physically distinct, but also remain sharply differentiated in economic, historical and cultural terms. Nevertheless, such differences are not always and inevitably instances of division and barriers. They can also act as hinges that serve both to close and to open doors in an increasing global traffic.

Migration, together with the enunciation of cultural borders and crossings, is also deeply inscribed in the itineraries of much contemporary reasoning. For migrancy and exile; as Edward Said points out, involves a ‘discontinuous state of being’, a form of picking a quarrel with where you come from. It has thereby been transformed ‘into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture’.⁵ For:

The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.⁶

Such a journey acquires the form of a restless interrogation, undoing its very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way. If exile presumes an initial home and the eventual promise of a return, the questions met with en route consistently breach the boundaries of such an itinerary. The possibilities of continuing to identify with such premises weaken and fall away. This memory of primary loss, persistently inscribed in the uncertain becoming of the outward journey, has made of exile a suggestive symbol of our times. Indeed, a significant tendency in present – day critical thought, confronted with the shrinkage of the European rationale that once claimed to speak for all and everything, is to adopt metaphors of movement, migration, maps, travel and sometimes a seemingly facile tourism. However, such metaphors are not restricted to the genealogy of a particular critical paradigm, or confined to the plane of a theoretical turn. Although we might cynically choose to read in recent intellectual peregrinations simply the latest twist in the continuing narrative of patriarchal, occidental intellectual power as it seeks to domesticate the rest and extend its hold over the once excluded and silent, there is clearly also something else occurring here. In the accelerating processes of globalisation we are also increasingly confronted with an extensive cultural and historical diversity that proves impermeable to the explanations we habitually employ. It is this complex and persistent challenge to the world we are accustomed to inhabit that forcibly suggests that we are not merely witness to the latest unwinding in the lax liberal spring of mental eclecticism.

For recent apertures in critical thought instigated by certain internal displacements in the hearth of the West (feminism, deconstructionism, psychoanalysis, post-metaphysical thought) have been increasingly augmented by the persistent question of a presence that no longer lies elsewhere: the return of the repressed, the subordinate and the forgotten in ‘Third World’ musics, literatures, poverties and populations as they come to occupy the economies, cities, institutions, media and leisure time of the First World.

Such a highly charged punctuation of the cosmopolitan script, destined finally to be recognised as a part of our history and be televised in future riots of the metropolitan dispossessed, compels us to recognise the need for a mode of thinking that is neither fixed nor stable, but is one that is open to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and revision. This retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical and cultural knowledge depend upon the recalling and re-membering of earlier fragments and traces that flare up and flash in our present ‘moment of danger’ as they come to live on in new constellations.⁷ These are fragments that remain as fragments: splinters of light that illuminate our journey while simultaneously casting questioning shadows along the path. The belief in the transparency of truth and the power of origins to define the finality of our passage is dispersed by this perpetual movement of transmutation and transformation. History is harvested and collected, to be assembled, made to speak, re-membered, re-read and rewritten, and language comes alive in transit, in interpretation.

To talk of this inheritance, to refer to history, as to refer to translation or memory, is always to speak of the incomplete, the never fully decipherable. It is to betray any hope of transparency. For to translate is always to transform. It always involves a necessary travesty of any metaphysics of authenticity or origins. We find ourselves employing a language that is always shadowed by loss, an elsewhere, a ghost: the unconscious, an ‘other’ text, an ‘other’ voice, an ‘other’ world; a language that is ‘powerfully affected by the foreign tongue’.⁸

For the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history, even if it pretends to carry a single name. Thought wanders. It migrates, requires translation. Here reason runs the risk of opening out on to the world, of finding itself in a passage without a reassuring foundation or finality: a passage open to the changing skies of existence and terrestrial illumination. No longer protected by the gods or their secular resurrection in the vestments of an imperious rationalism or positivist projection, thought runs the danger of becoming responsible for itself and the safekeeping of being, its only protection lying, as Rilke and Heidegger remind us, in the very absence of protection.⁹

This inevitably implies another sense of ‘home’, of being in the world. It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging. There is no one place, language or tradition that can claim this role. For although the journey from the centre into the periphery, seeking the unexpected, the bizarre and the wonder of it all, may still dominate this literature – this book, for example – such stories ultimately represent a weak echo in the volume of travel, migration and dislocation that so many people coming from elsewhere have faced and continue to experience. So, I finally come to experience the violence of alterity, of other worlds, languages and identities, and there finally discover my dwelling to be sustained across encounters, dialogues and clashes with other histories, other places, other people. For the return of the ‘native’ not only signals the dramatic necessity ‘to abrogate the boundaries between Western and non-Western history’, but also returns to the centre the violence that initially marked the encounters out in the periphery that laid the foundations of my world.¹⁰

So this is not necessarily even an account of travel. For to travel implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming – completing the story, domesticating the detour – becomes an impossibility. History gives way to histories, as the West gives way to the world.

It means to live in another country in which:

it becomes more than ever urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical processes. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and to substitute for it a lateral account of social relations, one that stresses the contingency of all definitions of self and the other, and the necessity always to tread lightly.¹¹

Does all this mean I have nothing to say, that every gesture that begins in the West is inherently imperialist, merely the latest move in the extension of my power regarding the others? It is perhaps here that the political and ethical implications of the arguments advanced in this book can be most clearly grasped as an attempt to fracture the vicious circle between speakers and the spoken for. For, in breaking into my own body of speech, opening up the gaps and listening to the silences in my own inheritance, I perhaps learn to tread lightly along the limits of where I am speaking from. I begin to comprehend that where there are limits there also exist other voices, bodies, worlds, on the other side, beyond my particular boundaries. In the pursuit of my desires across such frontiers I am paradoxically forced to face my confines, together with that excess that seeks to sustain the dialogues across them. Transported some way into this border country, I look into a potentially further space: the possibility of another place, another world, another future.

The accumulated diasporas of modernity, set in train by ‘modernisation’, the growing global economy, and the induced, often brutally enforced, migrations of individuals and whole populations from ‘peripheries’ towards Euro-American metropolises and ‘Third World’ cities, are of a magnitude and intensity that dramatically dwarf any direct comparison with the secondary and largely metaphorical journeys of intellectual thought. Analogy is risky. There is always the obvious allure of the romantic domestication and intellectual homecoming that the poetic figures of travel and exile promise. Still, it is a risk to be run. For the modern migrations of thought and people are phenomena that are deeply implicated in each other’s trajectories and futures.

To be forced to cross the Atlantic as a slave in chains, to cross the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande illegally, heading hopefully North, or even to sweat in slow queues before officialdom, clutching passports and work permits, is to acquire the habit of living between worlds, caught on a frontier that runs through your tongue, religion, music, dress, appearance and life. To come from elsewhere, from ‘there’ and not ‘here’, and hence to be simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand, is to live at the intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more extensive, arrangements along emerging routes. It is simultaneously to encounter the languages of powerlessness and the potential intimations of heterotopic futures. This drama, rarely freely chosen, is also the drama of the stranger. Cut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to make herself at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present.

As such the stranger is an emblem – she or he is a figure that draws our attention to the urgencies of our time: a presence that questions our present. For the stranger threatens the ‘binary classification deployed in the construction of orde...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Impossible Homecoming
• 2 Migrant Landscapes
• 3 The Aural Walk
• 4 Desiring Machines
• 5 The Broken World: Whose Centre, Whose Periphery?
• 6 Cities Without Maps
• 7 The Wound and the Shadow
• Bibliography