From Locations of Culture: Introduction

BORDER LIVES: THE ART OF THE PRESENT

Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the

borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other than
the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism,
postcolonialism, postfeminism…

The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past…
Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in
the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time
cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present,
inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a
disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’; an exploratory, restless movement caught
so well in the French rendition of the words au-dela- here and there, on all sides,
fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth.

The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual
and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions-
of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual
orientation-that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is
theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond
narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or
processes that are produced in the articulation o cultural differences. These ‘in-
between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular
or communal-that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of
collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (p 1-
2)

Pg 5. For the demography of the new internationalism in the history of postcolonial

migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social
displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim
prose of political and economic refugees.

Pg 6. What is striking about the ‘new’ internationalism is that the move from the
specific to the general, from the material to the metaphoric, is not a smooth
passage of transition and transcendence. The ‘middle passage’ of contemporary
culture, as with slavery itself, is a process of displacemtn and disjuncture that does
not totalize experience. Increasingly, ‘national’ cultures are being produced from
the perspective of disenfenachised minorities. The most significant effect of this
process is not the proliferation of ‘alternative histories of the excluded’ producing,
as some would have it, a pluralist anarchy. What my examples show is the changed
basis for making international connections. The currency of critical comparativism,
or aesthetic judgement, is no longer the sovereignity of the national culture
conceived as Benedict Anderson proposes as an ‘imagined community’ rooted in
an ‘homogeneous empty time’ of modernity and progress. The great connective
narratives of capitalism and class drive the engines of social reproduction, but do
not, in themselves, provide a foundational frame for those modes of cultural
identification and political affect that form around issues of sexuality, race,
feminism, the lifeworld of refugees or migrants, or the deathly social destiny of
AIDS.

Pg6. Being in the ‘beyond’, then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as nay

dictionary will tell you. But to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also, as I have shown, to be
part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural
contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the
future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space
‘beyond’,becomes a space of intervention in the here and now.

Pg 8. In their cultural passage, hither and thither, as migrant workers, part of the
massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world, they embody the
Benjamin (Walter) ‘present’: that moment blasted out of the continuum of history.
Such conditions of cultural displacement and social discrimination- where political
survivors become the best historical witnesses-are the grounds on which Frantz
Fanon, locate san agency of empowerment:
As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into
thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my
negating activity [my emphasis] insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do
battle for the creation of a human world-that is a world of reciprocal recognitions.

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into
existence.
In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the
historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.

Once again, it is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that
introduces creative invention into existence. And one last time, there is a return to
the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of
travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration. Fanon’s desire
for the recognition of cultural presence as ‘negating activity’ resonates with my
breaking of the time-barrier of a culturally collusive ‘present’.

 To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily

accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public
spheres. The unomely moment vreeps up on you stealthily as your own
shadow and suddenly you find yourself with Henry James’s Isabel Archer,
in The Portrait of a Lady, taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of
;incredulous terror’. And it is at this point that the world first shrinks for
Isabel and then expands enormously. As she struggles to survive the
fathomless waters, the rushing torrents, James introduces us to the
‘unhomeliness’ inherent in the rite of extra-territorial and cross-cultural
intitiation. The recesses of domestic space becomes the site for history’s
most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between
home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the
public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as
divided as disorienting.
 Bhabha in this essay calls the ‘unhomely’ a term that is paradigmatic of
the colonial and post-colonial condition.

From Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Imagination

Eds. Russell King, John Connell and Paul White, Routedge, London

Geography, Literature And Migration- Paul White

1. We live in what has recently been termed ‘The Age of Migration’.

Geographical movement can be seen as a crucial human experience. Such
 movement occurs within a striking concatenation of economic, political,
social and cultural circumstances which provide both structural forces
driving mobility and also the controlling mechanisms that limit and channel
the selection of people and places involved. These circumstances lie within
the range of traditional social-scientific concerns for the aggregate forces
and developments occurring within human populations.
At the same time population movement transforms all the elements
involved, not only in the structural circumstances that underpin migration
systems, but also within the places and the people bound up in migratory
experiences. Places of origin, of passage, and of destination of migrants are
altered as a result of the flows of people that affect them. Transfromations
also occur in the lives of all those who involved; not just the migrants
themselves but also those who directly come into contact with them and
those who, indirectly, are affected by social, political, and economic changes
induced by migration. The role of human agents is a determining one, but
only within the structural context in which those agents are located.
Migration therefore changes people and mentalities. New experiences result
from the con=ming together of multiple influences and peoples, and these
new experiences lead to altered or evolving representations of experiences
and of self-identity. Such representations are then manifest in cultural
artefacts of many kinds- new forms of dress, of food cultures and of
consumerism, new styles of music and of poetry,new political ideologies,
new forms of literary production.

2. MIGRATION AND IDENTITY SHIFT

A useful starting-point for the discussion of the representational outcomes of
migration experiences lies in setting up a conceptual framework consisting
of a series of possible shifts in identity that occur in relation tio mif=gration,
both at the individual and at larger-group levels. Such realignments of
identity may both precede migration (and in a sense, therefore, ‘cause’ it),
and they may also occur as a result of movement to a new location.
Migration ‘events’ therefore occur within personal biographies that neither
start nor end at those events, nut which provide the context for them. We
may, perhaps, conceptualize a number of overlapping multiple identities
which are the subject of constant renegotiation in the face of the conflicts
 and compromises of everyday life. Art any point in our lives we can think of
ourselves as relating to a number of identities- in gender terms (concerning
gender roles and gendered behavior: sexual identity may perhaps be better
considered as a separate element), in terms of a stage in the life-course, in
terms of age and family status, in terms of economic identity (related to
occupational identity but also to attributes of consumption and savings
propensities), in terms of linguistic, religious and other cultural identities
and in terms of ethnic identity…
The act of migration often relates to the calling into question of many of
these aspects of identity that make up the individual’s personality and
psychological self-image. This is not to say that mif=grants, before
migration, have necessarily ‘fitted in’ to a homogeneous societal structure
with no traces of discordance: indeed, sociaological and anthropological
studies have often suggested that migrants may be effectively ‘lost’ to their
home communities long before they actually pack their bags and leave, and
of course not ‘fitting in’ may be the primary cause for migration. Howevr,
the words ;migration; and ;change’ can almost be regarded as synonymous
in this context- why migrate if such movement does not result in change, or
does not accommodate an identity change that has already occurred?
3. Migration brings about radical transformation in many aspects that define an
individual, group or societal identity. Much academic writing about
migration has tended to ignore the significance of gender issues, but gender
role may be crucially affected by movement ( The Sea of Poppies). In other
spheres, families are often broken up, temporarily or on a long-term basis.
Economic status is altered, with changed employment, changed income and
wealth, and with changed patterns of consumption being very common.
Seculairsation may ensue, or alternatively there may be reassertions of
cultural (religious) distinctiveness through a re-energising of attributes of
distinction. Habitual language use may slide or be jolted from one tongue to
another, with all that such a change implies nabout the means of
representation in words- spoken or written. Projects, dreams and ultimate
goals may be revised. All of these changes are discernble in creative writing
about migration.
Shifts of identity are highly complex, sometimes unstable, and often have
reversible elements built into them. The titles of various works on
 migration,produced by creative writers or by social-scientific researchers,
suggest that migrants may libe in a number of worlds, and move between
them on a daily, annual or seasonal rhythm. Other changes resulting from
migration include attempts to re-create elements of former lives (possibly
accentuating significant icons of that existence into quasi-talismans of high
symbolic or ritualsignificance); attempts to integrate or assimilate
completely ( which may be blocked by a number of mechanisms within the
‘host’ society); or the creation of a new identity which is characterized by a
feeling of independence from both the society of origin and the social
structures of the destination. These changes in identity cannot be pinned
down to a rigid linear continuum, for they represent the multiple and
continually renegotiated outcomes of complex multifaceted phenomena
operating both within individual biographies and for societies as a whole.
4. A common feature of many migrants and migrant cultures is ambivalence.
Ambivalence towards the past and the present: as to whether things were
better ‘then’ or ‘now’. Ambivalence towards the future: whether to retain a
‘myth of return’ or to design a new project without further expected
movement built in. Ambivalence towards the ‘host’ society: feelings of
respect, dislike or uncertainty. Ambivalence towards standards of behavior:
whether to cling to the old or to discard it, whether to compromise via
symbolic events whilkst adhering to the new on an everyday basis. The
choices depend not just on the individuals involved but also on the
constraints of the situations in which migrants find themselves. And since
these situations change on a variety of temporal scales, so the identities
expressed through attitudes, behavior and artefacts also change and may be
marked by ambiguity.
5. But finally, it must be noted that amongst all the literature of migration the
highest proportion deals in some way with ideas of return, whether
actualized or remaining imaginary. To return may be to go back but it may
equally be to start again: to seek but also to lose. Return has both a tempral
and spatial dimension. For the individual returning to their ‘own’past and
place it is rarely satisfying: circumstances change, borders in all senses are
altered, and identities change too (SHADOW LINES). But for many in the
Age of Migration the time and place to be returned to are ill-defined. For
those brought up in families with a background of migration,
conceptualizations of ‘here’ and ‘ther’, of ‘home’ and ‘away’ are confused.