Nomadic histories: cinema and the “postcolonial lens”
By Guglielmo Scafirimuto
Universidad Paris 3, Nueva Sorbona
[textmarker color=»F76B00″ type=»background color»]INVESTIGACIÓN[/textmarker]
.
.
.
.
My intervention will focus on the relationship between postmodernism and post-colonialism and on how these two ways of understanding the contemporary world have implicated alternative modes of constructing counter and micro-histories and subjective narratives. I will explain this major link through a quick look at the recent developments of Film Studies related to migrant and exile conditions. Based on transnational and nomadic points of view, this kind of cinema is the perfect tool to deal with the questions raised by post-colonialism and postmodernism.
Following the poststructuralist split in language between sign and referent, postmodernism has enlarged this split as homologous with that between history and its representation or between text and interpretation. In opposition to modernism, which dominated the XX century, postmodernism arose from a series of controversial preoccupations existing in most of the cultural and artistic milieu since the 80s. As we can read in the list made by the early commentator Ihab Hassan in 1985, postmodernism is associated with: anti-form (disjunctive/open), play, chance, anarchy, silence, process, performance, participation, deconstruction, absence, dispersal, inter-text, anti-interpretation, anti-narrative, schizophrenia, immanence, pastiche. The context was that of the postindustrial, post-Fordist and globalization era, the spread of television, media and popular culture, the end of the clear division between labor and capital, high culture and mass culture. For some, like Susan Buck Morss (1), postmodernism “is a conceptual dead end” and not “a stage of history” limited to the context of its development, because late capitalism is still active and operative. For others, like Nigerian Denis Ekpo, the postmodern discourse is only another of the West’s crisis of consciousness: “Nothing stops the African from viewing the celebrated postmodern condition a little sarcastically as nothing but the hypocritical self-flattering cry of the bored and spoilt children of hypercapitalism” (2).
However, this crisis of centralization and fragmentation of the subject are also among the main points of postcolonial theory, which emerged right after postmodernism. Homi Bhabha, one of the key theorists of the field, wrote in 1992: “Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, historics of nations, races, communities, peoples” (3). While postcolonial theory has been heavily influenced by developments in Western philosophy, many of the main authors who have contributed to the affirmation of this field are non-western thinkers like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak. They have attempted to challenge the unique voice and authority of the western academic theories in order to formulate alternative and innovative discourses. As Buck Morss puts it (4) , the problem for modern postcolonial artists was “how to be modern without mimicking the West”. Historically, post-colonialism is a part of the tendency – mainly Anglo-Saxon – which has seen in the 80s and 90s the increasingly important contribution and convergence of feminism, multiculturalism, minority and gay and lesbian studies. Their shared interest of contesting imperialistic, capitalistic, white male Eurocentric vision of the world has been a real force to introduce interdisciplinary and transnationalism in academic researches.
According to Roger Berger (1992), postmodernism and post-colonialism are both “textual practices” and the two movements examine an “emergent or dominant global culture” bringing the “marginal” to the “center”. Helen Tiffin (1993) writes that they share strategies but have different motives. Some general features such as the investigation of representation in a sociocultural discourse, the abandon of universalism and the unmasking of control and ideology through language are common to both, but post-colonialism is more geographically and politically inspired at least in the tension between ex-colonies or powerless minorities and the West. Ato Quayson affirms that postmodernism is ultimately “apolitical and does not feed into larger projects of emancipation. To collocate the two, then, is somehow to disempower the postcolonial, which is conceived to be more concerned with pressing economic, political, and cultural inequalities” (5) . From the theoretical point of view, post-colonialism followed postmodernism assuming that anti-Eurocentrism is synonymous with anti-universalism, but for the purpose of social justice inherent to its critical and political discourse, according to Sebastiano Maffettone, post-colonialism should instead adopt another way of renewing modernity, universalism, rationalism and objectivity. He suggests that “from a post-colonial point of view, modern pluralism – (which means) there are many relevant ‘now’ and ‘here’ – works better than nihilism” (6). If we put all this in a larger theoretical context, we can see as well in the same period what Stephen A. Tyler calls “the postmodern ethnography”, a new therapeutic, aesthetical and poetical form of ethnography characterized by fragmentation, polyphony, perspectival relativity and dialogue over monologue. Following the ethnographical crisis of representation and of holistic and ideological illusion of control, Tyler suggests replacing representation with evocation: « the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation» (7) . The only answer to this impasse was, as Homi Bhabha wrote: “to identify minorities as agency”. That is the « Postcolonial turn » of the 80s and 90s, marked by syncretism, hybridity and creolization as renovating points of departure of new cultural actors. In echo of the desegregation and deconstruction of the subject and the narratives, postcolonial thought understands political subjectivity as a multidimensional, conflicted form of identification. Referring to the so-called other‘s identity, central to post-colonialism, the notion of hybridity was useful to overtake the naturalist, dominant and totalitarian vision of cultural representation, as we will observe in the diasporic cinema. Even though today this concept is not really employed anymore by social sciences and it is now seen as a limited, impersonal and even racist category by certain artists, James Elkins still defines it as a « placeholder for various kinds of mixture, coherence, and incoherence, many of them essential for the articulation of contemporary global art» (8).
In the time that postmodernism and post-colonialism were giving their fruits, many displaced filmmakers were dealing with the same mutations in society analyzed by these theories. Therefore, the universe of Film Studies started to elaborate a new apparatus of works differently named according to the scholar: the most common are Postcolonial / Transnational / Migrant / Diasporic / Accented / Interstitial / Multicultural / Intercultural Cinema. But many other definitions have come up: Will Higbee‘s “cinema of transvergence” (2007), Laura Marks “haptic cinema” (2009), Teshome Gabriel’s “nomadic aesthetic” (1988), Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema” (1969), Shohat and Stam’s “postcolonial hybrid films” (1994). The works concerned by this wave of studies were especially those made by the first and the second generation of immigrants, a large number of films that never could or wanted to constitute a homogenous group but which shared a series of key issues, methods and needs. For more than 30 years, we can find many examples of migrant and diasporic cinema in all Western countries. In the US, the independent and experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Trinh T Minh-ha among the others. In the UK the militant collectives of the Black British Audio Film Collective and the Asian British Film with filmmakers like John Akomfrah and Isaac Jones. In France the heterogeneous Cinéma Beur, constituted by several directors of Maghreb origins who used more comic tones like Mehdi Charef and Rachid Bouchareb, in Germany many Turkish filmmakers like Fatih Akin in the Netherlands the Moroccan movies; and other similar variants in Belgium, Scandinavia, Italy and Spain.
All these different examples demonstrate the contemporary tendencies already shown by postmodernist and postcolonial thinkers: the ideological decentralization against the opposition between the Center and the Periphery, the alternative modes of production and expression that offer a dialectic configuration situated not only in a trans-disciplinary approach but also behind the idea of the nation-state. The recent historical changes do not need a prescriptive and descriptive national attitude today, but instead, a transnationalism in terms of esthetical, political and cultural circularity. Migrations allow plural and dialogical articulations between the local and the global, the home country and the host country, the Self and the Other, the past and the present. All that means horizontality over verticality, « network over nation ». The subjects no longer have a direct connection with one place or a sense of belonging to one environment, but instead, live in an open and often contradictory system of comprehension of space. Cinema can be an ideal tool to stress the ambiguity of the in-between exiled condition, if we conceive film, as Trinh T. Minh-ha does, as “an act of translation”. Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller writes: « Film (and media generally), because they can deal in fantasy and the imaginary, project new possibilities of resistance and subversion, particularly through the prisms of micropolitics and aesthetics. The grand rècits break down opening space for the infinite specificities that refract larger, often repressed, miswritten, and unofficial histories of the nation, communities, classes, genders, and subaltern groups». Their book about Postcolonial Cinema (2012) describes those films whose main attribute is to wear a “postcolonial lens”. These special lenses help focalize attention on postcolonial relations and on relocation and renegotiation of power. Ponzanesi and Waller observe: “Nostalgia, memory, amnesia, trauma, denial, repression, guilt – and, not least, humor – are some of the recurrent traits of postcolonial films where identities have become unstable, and the past comes to haunt the present in the forms of ghosts, shadows, written documents, and phantasmatic spaces. They move toward margins and spaces between, proliferating stories and identities, which become nomadic rather than theological” (9).
According to Daniel Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg and their work about Migrant and Diasporic Films (2010), cinema and migration are two similar concepts that embody movement and exemplify Modernity. Films made especially by second generation immigrants – whose approach is often less “conservative” than that of the first generation – signed what they call the « World Cinema turn » bringing an international and revitalizing movement into European cinema. This renovation interrogates other possibilities of European identity introducing questions of belonging, ethnicity and transculturality in the mixed spaces of cosmopolitan cities. In his important book Accented Cinema (2001) Hamid Naficy speaks about exiled works as a cinema with an “accent”. This “accent” comes from its marginality, originality, independence, and hybridity, in opposition to Western cinema that considers itself as normative and without an accent. The style of this “accented cinema” is fragmented, liminal, multi-linguistic and self-reflexive. Its themes are migration, historicity, identity, and displacement, while its mode of production is interstitial and often collective. Transnational filmmakers usually adopt experimental forms in their effort to translate experiences of exile in order to communicate the desire of reconstruction and continuity in the absence and distance. This is often related to autobiographical, epistolary, intimate and familiar narratives in connection with transitional places like borders, airports, hotels, trains, ports, and prisons. The notion of plurality – of languages, spaces, and identities – marks the subjectivity of the migrant living between rupture and continuity, a traumatic relation with the past and a critical adaptation to the present. Postmodern and postcolonial conditions are well represented in this subject who experiences the most the ambiguity and the polyphony of the contemporary world refusing any definition, limitation and universalism. Naficy, as well as Stuart Hall, refers to this identity as the product of the “politic of the hyphen”, a sort of open definition that we use when we say for example “African-American” or “Franco-Algerian”. The “postcolonial lens” helps to understand this ensemble of nomadic histories, which, through the “third spaces” mentioned by Homi Bhabha, become counter-histories. Indeed, contesting official and dominant history, often written by colonial hands, is a need of the postcolonial subject who is trying to reformulate the past in search of identification. For this purpose, individual memories join collective representations in order to construct new personal images of the Self, the community or the homeland. Micro-history, from a subjective and individual point of view, challenges the imaginary of the large-scale and often media macro-history. The image, in this circularity of different voices, becomes the trace of a language that looks for its interlocutor. We should ask then not only, as Spivak does, “Can subaltern speak?” but also, as Naficy says, “Can subaltern be heard?”.
Bill Nichols analyses the same transformations in the postmodern shift that affected documentary in general and postcolonial documentary in particular during the late 80s and the early 90s: “Traditionally, the word documentary has suggested fullness and completion, knowledge and fact, explanations of the social world and its motivating mechanisms. More recently, though, documentary has come to suggest incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction” (10). This is part of the aforementioned “crisis of representation” that has implied an increasing “auto-ethnographic expression” – the native’s or other ‘s point of view – in both text and visual practices and always new ways of dialogue and exchange between cultures. In her film Reassemblage (1982), Trinh T. Minh-ha introduces the concept of “speaking nearby”, a critical interrogation about positioning the Self and the Other in relation to a personal, complex and multiple restitution of the field and not a unique imposing of a hypothetical ‘truth’. Linda Williams observes that the lack of references to the “permanent state of the self-reflexive crisis of representation” has a consequentially reductive interpretation of representation as a mirror reflecting only another mirror, or a “postmodern hall of mirrors” (11). Contesting Jameson’s radical vision of postmodernism, Williams uses the Freudian notion of “palimpsest” to evoke the end of essentialism and the possibility of “a set of strategies designed to choose from among a horizon of relative and contingent truths”. She concludes: “Not all that postmodern representation inevitably succumbs to a depthlessness of the simulacrum, or that it gives up on truth to wallow in the undecidabilities of representation. The lesson, rather, is that can be historical depth to the notion of truth – not the depth of unearthing a coherent and unitary past, but the depth of the past’s reverberation with the present. If the authoritative means to the truth of the past does to exist, if photographs and moving images are not mirrors with memories, if they are more, as Baudrillard has suggested, like a hall of mirrors, then our best response to this crisis of representation might be (…) to deploy the many facets of these mirrors to reveal the seduction of lies” (12).
We have seen how the heterogeneous work of migrant filmmakers has founded its place in Postcolonial film studies to articulate more political versions of the crisis of the subject of postmodernism and of the crisis of representation of the postmodern ethnography. This passage towards self-representation was necessary as part of the politics of resistance and identification at the time of decolonization. Still, the increasing trend of global migrations of the last 30 years oblige us to expand post-colonialism to include the recent dynamics of the conflicts around nationalism, post-nationalism and multiculturalism. Diasporic Cinema shows us the quest of self-image and own history behind national logics and dominant representations. At the same time, the refusal of the notion of hybridity, the attempt to find “contingent truths of representation”, the stabilization of the new generations of migrants, open the way to discuss about building our “life in common” in today’s societies. Does post-colonialism, as Sebastiano Maffettone suggests, need to get rid of the “nihilist”, subjective, partial and relative expression of contemporary pluralism and postmodernism to find a new objectiveness and universalism for its social goal? Being aware of the struggle of every people, community and territory “here” as well as “out there” has to develop inclusivity and comparativeness in all fields of human and social studies. Certainly, the widespread claim of localism does not elude, for example, the question of the pertinence of defining “global art” in the XXI century. After the necessity of counter and micro-histories arose to stop inequalities in the hierarchical division between the West and the rest, can we consider the possibility of a horizontal and polyphonic global history?
Image: Public Domain CC. PIXNIO
.
.
Guglielmo Scafirimuto es un candidato a doctorado italiano, inscrito en el tercer año de tesis en la Universidad Paris 3, Nueva Sorbona. Trabaja en la relación cine y migración, en particular sobre la identidad y la memoria en los documentales autobiográficos de artistas que surgieron de la migración.
.
.
1 Interview 2002, https://platypus1917.org/2011/04/02/postcolonialism-or-postmodernism-an-interview-with-susan-buck-morss/ 2 Ekpo “Towards a post-Africanism”1995 mentioned by Ato Quayson, “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism” in Henry Schwarz, Sangeeta Ray (edit.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2005, pp.87-88. 3 Homi Bhabha 1992, in Ato Quayson, op.cit., p.94. 4 Interview, 2002, see above 5 Ato Quayson, op.cit., p.87 6. See http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000022224) 7 Stephen A. Tyler, “Post-Modern Ethnography” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture. The Poetics And Politics Of Ethnography, University of California Press, 1986, p.128 8 James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, Alice Kim (edit.), Art and globalization, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 2010, pp.61-62 9 Ponzanesi S., Waller M., Postcolonial Cinema Studies, Routledge, London, 2012, p.12 10 Nichols Bill, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of meaning in contemporary culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994 p.1 11 Linda Williams: “Mirrors without Memories. Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line” in Barry Keith Grant, Jeannette Sloniowski (dir.), Documenting the documentary. Close readings of documentary film and Video, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1998, pp.380-381. 12 Ibidem, p.394