A Questionnaire on Diaspora and the Modern OCTOBER 186 Fall 2023, pp. 3–112. © 2023 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00500 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00500/2205097/octo_a_00500.pdf by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, UCLA user on 06 January 2024 The twentieth century was deeply grooved with the trodden pathways of mass migrations. These journeys were propelled by violence and historical cataclysm: pogroms and genocides; natural and unnatural famines and disasters; land dispossession, regimes of apartheid and forced labor; revolution, war, and occupation; colonization and decolonization; and the realignments that followed in their wake. The pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois may have been the first to herald the character of the new century: Already in 1903, in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk, he situated “the color line” as the defining “problem of the twentieth century” in relation to diaspora. Theorists and writers as diverse as Georg Simmel, Paul Gilroy, Édouard Glissant, Kobena Mercer, Tony Judt, Brent Hayes Edwards, Fred Moten, Krista Thompson, Huey Copeland, and Saidiya Hartman have offered frameworks for understanding diaspora as a cultural formation inextricable from modernity itself. As their work suggests, diasporic thinking puts pressure on the ways that we have understood—and often continue to understand—both modernism and the modern. It counters linear narratives of time, geography, and memory; identities defined by national boundaries; the absence of concerns about race and the complicity that modernisms have had with regimes of power; and a vision of the modern severed from heritage or tradition. Yet despite the diasporic displacements that define the modern period, modernist studies within art history have often favored bounded narrative formations still fundamentally shaped by ideas of the individual and the nation-state as well as taxonomic categorizations according to style, movement, medium, and period. In part, these narrative choices both produce and are symptomatic of a deeply siloed field, cleaved into regional micro-domains (Americanists, Mexicanists); medium specialists (photo people and print people); and the imagined ruptures between the modern and the contemporary, the modern and the postmodern, and the Western and the non-Western. Departmental structures, journals, job markets, museums, and galleries are still siloed by race, siphoned into forms of intellectual segregation that are normalized to an extraordinary degree. Art history, in other words, is divided. Given this, what should we do with the modern? The questions are many: How does attention to diasporic thinking shift our understanding of the modern—or 4 OCTOBER —Leah Dickerman for the Editors Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00500/2205097/octo_a_00500.pdf by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, UCLA user on 06 January 2024 does such thinking invalidate its historical and epistemological claims? How do we create space for the unseen and unthought? How do we write history in a mode skeptical of grand narratives that takes account of darkness as well as light? Or, following Fred Moten’s explorations regarding a Black avant-garde: How do notions of avant-gardism put pressure on the ways in which we continue to understand modernism? Does the term “modernism” itself have continued viability and usefulness? If so, to what degree is diaspora—the propulsive vectors and cultural effects of multiple mass migrations—integral to it? Or are modernism and the interests of diaspora antithetical frameworks for the history of art, given what the former has historically enabled and repressed? And, finally, what methodological approaches might reveal its structuring forces in our approach to the cultural objects of the modern period? 60 OCTOBER The idea of diaspora invokes a scattering or dispersal. It confronts processes of migration and mobility. It rejects the false image of naturalized nations. And it insists on dynamic interactions over static conceptions of culture and identity. It is thus crucial to understanding the experience of modernity and the forms of artistic expression we understand as modernism. This was the argument made by Raymond Williams, the Welsh-born “New Left” literary critic and founding figure of cultural studies in Britain, in his account of the modernist avant-garde. For Williams, the link between immigration and innovation was essential to questions of form, and he advocated for an account of the émigré in his development of a “fully responsible” cultural-studies paradigm.1 Although the term diaspora did not figure prominently in Williams’s theoretical vocabulary and did not appear as an entry in his incisive 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which investigated the changing nature of intellectual categories, his perceptions about the centrality of migration to modernism were penetrating. Williams’s prescient account was no doubt linked to his own experience of migration from what he called a “remote village” in Wales to the shape-shifting urban spaces of England during the postwar period and in the bewildering aftermath of its empire. Williams may appear an unlikely departure point for a discussion of diaspora and modernism in art history. He nonetheless represents an alternative coordinate in an expansive framework of ideas that transcends the narrow boundaries of the field, which is a methodological necessity when it comes to diaspora. Commonly associated in the first place with the long and complex history of the Jewish people, the language of diaspora became crucially transformed by the historical experience of African slavery when embraced by radical Black thinkers throughout the twentieth century.2 Diaspora thus bears some of the gravitas of these violent and archetypal histories of persecution and enslavement and their specific experiences of dispossession. At the same time, the term has been indiscriminately applied to almost any dispersed community in multicultural America, giving rise to narratives of fragmentation and displacement, issues of origins and authenticity, and problems of identity and belonging. These are some of the recurring themes that get attached to diasporic phenomena and produce a variety of affective states, such as longing, nostalgia, melancholia, and loss. In India, those of us coming of age in the diaspora were said to have taken a pill, diasporin, which generated such side effects, the relentless symptoms of diaspora’s existential economy. Most of the major theorists of diaspora recognized that there were problems with the concept. For example, the tendency for diaspora to signify a bounded or preexisting community, like the Indian diaspora or the Irish diaspora, with fixed para1. Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 84. 2. See Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage Publications/The Open University, 1997). Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00500/2205097/octo_a_00500.pdf by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, UCLA user on 06 January 2024 SALONI MATHUR A Questionnaire on Diaspora and the Modern 61 3. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 23. 4. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5. Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” p. 318. 6. Ibid., p. 320. 7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. xxii. 8. Kobena Mercer, “A Sociography of Diaspora,” in Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 217. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00500/2205097/octo_a_00500.pdf by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, UCLA user on 06 January 2024 meters that could somehow be determined. Diaspora is, in this sense, a fragile concept, imbued with false dreams of circumscribed publics, a weak binding agent at best. Stuart Hall, who was of course greatly influenced by Williams, cautioned against imposing “an imaginary coherence” on the amorphous dispersal at the heart of diaspora and focused instead on the constant conditions of renewal and transformation as diaspora’s most productive feature.3 James Clifford similarly saw diaspora as an emergent space—though one fraught with a “utopic/dystopic tension”—that was linked to his notion of “traveling cultures,” which privileged routes (that is, journeys) over the primordial language of roots.4 For Paul Gilroy, diasporas were “relational networks” involving mobile forms of identification, the result of “forced dispersal and reluctant scattering,” always powerful in their transformative force.5 If the notion of “reluctant scattering” here seems to strangely understate the horror-filled journey of the Middle Passage, Gilroy nonetheless passionately asserted that slavery was not “some peripheral element or sub-plot” in the story of capitalism and industrialization but rather integral to modernity itself.6 Thirty years on, it seems a growing number of art historians are finally demanding from the discipline a more integrated portrait of the twentieth century along the lines that Gilroy had envisioned. For to ignore the world-historical contexts of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle in the modern era, not to mention the interpolation of these fraught histories into the ongoing drama of multiculturalism and immigration in the metropolitan centers of the West, is to have missed—in the words of Edward Said—“what is essential about the world in the past century.”7 In a discerning essay that revisits Hall’s long-standing investments in the concept of diaspora, Kobena Mercer observes how Hall’s writings on the theme, which begin in the late 1960s and culminate in his more famous essays from the ’90s, are themselves scattered and dispersed throughout his oeuvre. As Mercer notes, Hall wrote about diaspora not as a “discrete sociological object” but as a “decentering realm” from within the “social worlds of diaspora” itself.8 The insight can be extended to other scholars writing in the 1990s—Gilroy, Clifford, Arjun Appadurai, and Mercer himself, to name a few—who seemed to be studying a phenomenon in real time, and from within its transformational processes. Acutely aware of the changing global conditions in which they were writing, they sought a new language with which to confront the fundamental mobility of culture and identity. The problem, in the broadest sense, was to grasp the themes of migration and displacement that were 62 OCTOBER SALONI MATHUR is a professor of art history at UCLA. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00500/2205097/octo_a_00500.pdf by UNIV OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, UCLA user on 06 January 2024 transforming the world in the 1990s into an increasingly transnational configuration as a result of the forces of globalization. Significantly, that theme—human migration and displacement—appears to have expanded exponentially in the intervening decades, frequently in explosive and crisis-causing ways. The purposeful and passionate turn to the concept of diaspora in such thinkers as a means to struggle with these realities, both past and present, is thus something that I believe can and should be critically embraced by art history. How, then, should we mobilize the “decentering realm” of diaspora for a renewed art history of modernism? The kind of practice I have in mind would prioritize the vexed relations of exile and migration in order to further disrupt the settled stories of formal breakthroughs and national achievements. It would necessarily begin with a heightened self-awareness of modernism’s constitutive inclusions and exclusions, with an eye towards the dynamics of the latter through uncharted routes and unexpected dispersals. It would strive for global and comparative understanding and a productive troubling of the existing canon. It would tell the story of artistic connections between the avant-garde movements of Europe, South Asia, Africa, East Asia, and North and South America, in part by highlighting the global incursions of artists and ideas in and out of the dominant centers, capturing the dizzying cosmopolitanism and internationalism of the era. It would build on both the existing theories of modernism in the West, stretching them across other cultural contexts and modalities, and the growing body of literature in art history concerned with the problems of difference and disalignment of non-Western modernities. Artists and artworks would be judged by criteria generated by these new conjunctural, relational, and centrifugal approaches to history, and not by modernism’s own ethnocentric mappings of center and periphery, or its temporal hierarchies of “advanced” and “behind.” This future art history would offer a pluralistic picture of modernism in the twentieth century, without flinching from the contradictions and paradoxical dilemmas that modernity’s Euro-Western provenance has produced. Needless to say, the decentering vision that diaspora affords would have farreaching implications for pedagogy in art history and the curricular structure of the discipline itself. It would place difficult demands upon our existing areas of geographic expertise and necessitate a more rigorous and comparative training. The locations of the archive would have to be constituted anew; language demands for future scholars would get more difficult still; historiographic difficulties would undoubtedly emerge; the relationships between “area” and “theory” would undoubtedly implode. The preparedness of the field of modern art history for the more uncomfortable aspects of such combustive transformation is of course something that remains to be seen. But it should not prevent us from being open to the possibilities of diasporic understanding, activating its potency against the uncertainties of the future, and embracing the principles of renewal and becoming at the core of the idea of diaspora itself.