THEORY, DISCOURSE AND LANGUAGE: ON DIASPORA POLITICS, MIGRANT VOICES AND SUBALTERN SILENCE

THEORY, DISCOURSE AND LANGUAGE: ON DIASPORA POLITICS, MIGRANT VOICES AND SUBALTERN SILENCE Imanol Galfarsoro1

Abstract: This article discusses critical questions of identity and culture in regards of diaspora politics in theoretical terms. The first section centers on presenting the overall terms around which diaspora politics hinge (notions of median state and double consciousness, voice and silence of migrants, foreigners etc.) together with focusing the debate on the overall linguistic problematic surrounding such politics. The task of the second part is to produce a critical appraisal of such notions as hybrid cultures and/or hybridization. Often associated with the ideas of the Atlantic and travelling cultures, the notion of hybrid identities certainly invites to think about cultural positions as plural and un-fixed. In this context, however, the limits of cultural and postcolonial studies when dealing with diaspora politics must also be exposed. In this paper this critique is threefold: to a linguistic critique of cultural studies, a political critique also follows of postmodern notions of western ‘nomadicism’; finally, a social

Recepción: 19, enero, 2013 || Aceptación: 30, julio, 2013 Cita recomendada: GALFARSORO, Imanol (2013). “Theory, discourse and language: on diaspora politics, migrant voices and subaltern silence”. Prosopopeya. Revista de crítica contemporánea. Número 8. pp. 61-96. Biodata: Imanol Galfarsoro es doctor en Sociología por la Universidad de Leeds, Reino Unido, donde realiza investigaciones en torno al multiculturalismo. Sus intereses intelectuales se centran en los estudios subalternos y post-coloniales, teoría cultural, historia de la cultura e historia de las ideas marxistas. Formado en las universidades de Toulouse, Burdeos (Francia), Liverpool y Leeds (Reino Unido), ha impartido clases como profesor de Hispánicas y Lingüística en la Universidad Metropolitana de Londres, y ha visitado el Centro de Estudios Vascos de la Universidad de Nevada, Reno (EE.UU.) así como la Universidad del País Vasco (EHU) y la Universidad Vasca de Verano (UEU) donde enseña con regularidad. Toma parte activa en redes interdisciplinarias de investigación transnacional y lleva a cabo estudios académicos sobre cuestiones relacionados con la diversidad cultural, y las políticas de la identidad. También participa en varios proyectos intelectuales de base que reflejan su interés en la intersección de la teoría social crítica y la filosofía política con los estudios post-coloniales. Ha publicado y editado numerosos artículos, así como columnas de opinión; también ha escrito dos libros —Subordinazioaren Kontra (2008)y Kultura eta Identitate Erbesteratuak, Nomadologia subalternoak (2004) ambos en la editorial Pamiela—; presentaciones o prólogos de varios otros libros en español, euskara e inglés. 1

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University of Leeds [email protected]

Imanol Galfarsoro

critique of ‘hybridization’ is also carried out or, most particularly, a critique of the assumption that ‘multicultural’ migrants may willingly enjoy hybridization.

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Keywords: Diaspora, Hybrid Cultures, Language, Subalternity, Voice & Silence Resumen: En este artículo se discuten teóricamente cuestiones relacionadas con la identidad y la cultura en lo que respecta a las políticas de la diáspora. La primera sección de este trabajo se centra en la presentación de los términos generales en torno a los cuales se articulan las políticas diaspóricas (nociones de estadio intermedio, doble conciencia, voz y silencio de los migrantes, extranjeros, etc). También se presenta, más en concreto, la problemática general de las políticas lingüísticas que rodean esta cuestión. La tarea de la segunda parte es continuar con una evaluación crítica de nociones como culturas híbridas y/o hibridación. Ciertamente, la noción de identidades híbridas (a menudo asociada con ideas de lo Atlántico y las culturas viajeras) invita a pensar acerca de las posiciones culturales en tanto en cuanto plurales y fluidas. En este contexto, sin embargo, este trabajo expone los límites de los estudios culturales y poscoloniales a tres niveles complementarios: a la crítica propiamente lingüística de los estudios culturales de corte anglo-sajón, se añade de este modo una crítica política de las nociones posmodernas del ‘nomadicismo’ occidental así como una crítica social de la noción de hibridación o, más concretamente, del supuesto según el cual los migrantes ‘multiculturales’ llegan a disfrutar (o gozar) voluntariamente de la hibridación. Palabras clave: Diáspora, culturas Híbridas, lenguaje, subalternidad, silencio y voz.

1. Two personal occurrences Two personal occurrences, which transcend their initial anecdotic nature, may help framing this paper. The first refers to a conference that took place at Liverpool University called Rethinking the Iberian Atlantic (2006). Two young and upper coming scholars produced a joint presentation on some road-movie. The whole presentation was organized around the well-known motives of movement as resistance, non-fixity of identities, excess, transgression etc. When in the question time I asked how resistance and radical politics could be produced if it was not from some fix or stable position I was given no question whatsoever. Instead a doubly coordinated giggling shoulder raise clearly signaled something like ‘we do not know but what do we care so long as this panel presentation counts for our cv’! Later, in a book review of Joseba Gabilondo’s Nazioaren Hondarrak (Remains of the Nation, 2006) I pointed out some of my misgivings regarding the 62

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ambiguities informing current cultural and post-colonial studies, of which this minor conference incident was certainly a symptom. Although a long passage, it is worth quoting at full length: Gabilondo’s work on Basque literature and post-nationalism is a great contribution to the task of overcoming standard essentialist representations underlying Basque (cultural) politics, particularly in relation to the officially established academic area of Basque (literary) studies. This is why, as it is stated in his book, post-national critique proper (i) “incorporates the legacy of poststructuralist, (post-) Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, cultural and gay (or queer) studies presenting these critical movements as a point of departure and proposal for rethinking Basque literature” (13). In addition Gabilondo points out that this critique also suggests (ii) “a new horizon where the geopolitical dimension (postnational) meets the biopolitical dimension (sex, gender, race, class, etc.)” (15). Gabilondo’s work provides, therefore, an innovative critical discourse that captures the new (post-) diasporic dynamics affecting Basque identity and culture in all its geopolitical and bio-political complexities. However, Gabilondo is also aware of two dangers that may end up tarnishing the critical value rooted in his (and indeed, in many of our) intellectual interventions. One is the increasingly evident, and only to some extent paradoxical alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism. This is so in spite of Gabilondo’s assertion that “[t] he main aim is not to recreate a benign and harmless style of liberal linguistic multiculturalism, but instead, to introduce national and linguistic heterogeneity as critical vectors with which to rethink the crisis of the imperialist nation-state” (15). The second danger relates to the very specific location from where Gabilondo presents his criticism: “It is important to underline that […] academic dynamics in the United States […] and the constant pressure to renew and rebuild oneself also carries the danger of turning literary criticism into a slave of the latest trend in academic fashion”.(24-25). This is perhaps also the reason why even Gabilondo’s conscious assumption of “such dangers” cannot explain the fact that, in these post-political, pragmatic, cynical and opportunistic times in which we all live (Žižek often reminds us of these terms) the apparent discursive radicalism of cultural, poststructuralist and postcolonial studies can only conceal an endogenous political agenda within the heavily guarded walls of (Anglo-Saxon) academia. This amounts nowadays to ‘going with the flow’ of what has become the new dominant canon within the interdisciplinary humanities; as if, by any chance, it was also possible to develop a consistent political and cultural critique relying on the ethereal weight of a few (literally) ‘empty signifiers’: please enter the word ‘decolonize’, do not forget to mention concepts such as ‘resistance’, ‘subversion’ and ‘carnival reversal’, challenge ‘Eurocentrism’ and ‘logocentric binary oppositions’, use notions such as ‘dystopian’, ‘nomadic’ and ‘de-essentialize’… (2009: 154-55) (original in Spanish and quotes in Basque, my translation). 63

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In short, the first incident above signals how cultural and postcolonial studies within the fields of Hispanic and Latin-American studies in the Anglo-Saxon world are also being co-opted into becoming a ‘benign’ academic product devoid of its original ‘malignant’ supplement, i.e.: radical intellectual interventions, critical conversations etc. The second incident refers instead to how the ‘liberal mind’ functions broadly within the fields of Basque cultural politics and more particularly in the Basque literary field.

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To put it in lacanese dialect, I once felt ‘honoured’ of becoming the object petit à of Bernardo Atxaga’s wrath. I had then just published my second book called Against Subordination, (Subordinazioaren Kontra 2008) and it is true that I did use two novels by Atxaga for different purposes. The first was Obabakoak (1988) and I found that the magical realism of this book was very appropriate for framing a character in my own dissertation, notably a pedophile priest who happened to find an unpublished manuscript by Hegel on sexuality (this I took from Žižek’s introduction to the Parallax View, 2006). There was nothing particularly unbecoming or critical to Atxaga’s work in this choice. If anything, it was the opposite. It was to recognize the heuristic power behind the idea of Obaba as a place where fantasy ruled. Certainly, as Obabakoak represented a whole world living under the spell of magic realism, I then went on with another supplementary idea. I thus suggested that just as much as white moths could snow down into a mint field near Obaba, there was no problem of vraisemblance either with a narrator telling us of a three-some sex orgy taking place between two brothers and a peasant girl, and then one of the brothers becoming a wolf (actually there is a separate fiction by Atxaga called Two Brothers as well). This, however, also led me into a further reflection, and now yes, it also led me to a severe critique of how ‘fiction’ understood as both ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ can be sometimes articulated in rather unforthcoming ways. The problem, as I pointed out, was with another work by Atxaga, The Lone Women, by all accounts all too simply a “realist” travel novel with little “magic” in it, particularly at the beginning. The short novel itself revolves around the character of a thirty something ETA operative newly released from prison and her coach journey from Barcelona to the Basqueland. What was problematic, according to my analysis, and as I also pointed out in my dissertation, according to my English wife qua reader, was that a woman just out of prison

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should spend her first night of freedom in a cheap hotel with a stranger that she picks up in a bar. In my reader-wife’s opinion, who gave up reading the novel after a few pages, this was nothing to do with the narrator and all to do with the very author’s own “pure male fantasy”, as she literally put it completely oblivious of any Basque-related controversies. What I did is only to add some bibliographic meat to the bones provided through my wife’s legitimate rant. What I pointed out was that even if scholars dealing with the topic of travelling cultures speak of hotels as places where fleeting encounters take place, it was still not very ‘realist’ that the first thing a newly freed female prisoner would do is to strive for a ‘quicky’; since referring to it as a “one night-stand” would amount to turn the incident into far too romantic an occasion! In short, too much of a male caricature of female desire, I thought, and then I continued pointing to critical works by radical feminists whose approaches were and still are quite insightful in regards of sexuality and the debate on pornography. Hence, although the ironic mode was certainly on, mine was always an attempt at a serious critique of male unwarranted chauvinism, which, obviously, always appears under the pretence of the opposite in the liberal mind. By all accounts, Atxaga did not think so at all as it appears in this passage below of an interview by Mikel Asurmendi with the title of “Bernardo Atxaga: We Basques have become all rhetorical”: Q. You have been a defender of the idea of the ​​ Basque city. You are also at the receiving end of various responses and criticisms. To my mind come Imanol Galfarsoro’s essay Subordinazioaren Kontra (Against Subordination) and Xabier Montoya’s novel Euskal Hiria Sutan (The Basque City’s Burning). What do you think of the Basque City today? A. The answer to this is in my blog (called astoarena, “Of Donkeys”). Critique bothers everybody, of course. But do not say “Hey you, you are from Bristol” … Sorry, I am not, a bit of attention to detail please! I do say things, sure. In other words, I take the ball and I hit it. But what do they do? I do not feel any of them saying anything. What one does is to whistle against me while I am about to kickstart the game but before actually hitting the ball, while the other tells a joke to the one sitting next to him as now the game is on. That is not to give an answer. It would be nice to organize a huge school in the Basque Country in order to educate Basques. In fact, to put an example, it is through my book Lekuak (Places [2005]) that I have spoken, if there is anybody out there willing to take seriously what I say in a very precise manner. There I do not kick the ball away. You tell me: “they have responded to me”. I have not seen much of a response. If someone 65

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is whistling at, or cracking a joke about a text of mine, if he wants to insult me, then I do not take these badly, but they are not responses. I am tired with the issue of the Basque City. There is no critical thinking in the Basque (speaking) world. If there is any thinking going on this is thanks to the Juan Zelaia essay-writting award, which (the publishing house) Pamiela organizes (yearly). I am dying to see a proper debate and reflection emerge for clearly, I do not think the situation is very encouraging. (2009:24)

I leave most of the answer un-commented for readers to draw their own conclusions. There is one opinion, however, which needs more scrutiny since it is most closely related to our topic. Of course one read Lekuak (Places). It is certainly a rare occasion where Atxaga attempts at writing an essay instead of a novel. Coincidently it was published a few months after my own Nomadologia Subalternoak (Subaltern Nomadologies, 2005). The fact that a few chapters in it already anticipated the two main overall themes Atxaga explored in his is beyond the point here. Why should have he read the work of an unknown author in the first place? The point still remains that my own takes on travelling cultures and cosmopolitanism, on being out of place, exile and double consciousness, or on the questions of hybridization and post-nationalism (2005: 23-56) constituted a foretold critique, as it were, of Atxaga’s standard liberal multiculturalist approach to travelling and knowing places. Likewise the passages which addressed the questions of culture, anthropology and national aesthetics, or the reflections around the travelling identity of theory and the subaltern theory of identity, or the insights into the notions of strategic essentialism and hyphenated vs. dominant identities (57-92) can still be read nowadays as the critical counterpoint to Atxaga’s views expressed in Lekuak on the Basque national question and also what was at the time a key polarizing issue, notably political violence. Nowadays there is no need to ponder much further on these matters. There are certainly great moments in Lekuak which are still valid today. The possibility Atxaga envisages of being both of peasant origin and a cosmopolitan at the same time admittedly offers the reader a most delightful passage in the book as, in some writers’ conference at Salamanca if I recall well, he confronted the pretentious universalism of the Spanish literary establishment heads on. Yet the fact he should dismiss all peer critique as nonsense does not tell much of the tolerance and pluralism he publicly professes. 66

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It may be true that as he goes on saying in another passage of the interview “the hypercritical attitude which is dominant in the Basque Country is in fact a-critical” (26). The fact still remains that what is impossible nowadays is to live under the un-critical illusion that belonging to, and defending a minority language and culture gives one the inherent right to inhabit a pristine subject position of sorts. Žižek is clear on this account. It is not culture but the struggle that will unite us by giving our particular identities a universal dimension. Basque culture, like any other culture minority or not, is split along many contradictions that must be articulated politically around concrete antagonisms. Speaking the same (minority) language does not make us share the same side of the divide.

2. Introduction: critical questions about identity and culture For the new diaspora subject (Hall, 1993) experiences of displacement, absence, separation and foreignness stir up an irremediable sentiment of nostalgic identification with the traditions, languages and beliefs of a lost space/time at home. Without ever being free of attachment and sentiments towards friends, family and community, common sense fades away, nevertheless; and things or ideas utterly taken for granted at home become doubtful. Nothing is evident. Nothing is completely permanent, obvious, necessary or indispensable. Nothing is ‘natural’. Taken for granted constructions built in the “homeland” in order to protect the sense of a naturally constituted collective identity loosen strength and rigidity. The precious sense of obviousness rooted in the certainty of belonging becomes all too relative in the face of the very ambivalence informing identity construction, always already ‘un-fixed’, always-already ‘hybrid’. Yet, at the same time, the very languages of up-rooted/routed (Clifford, 1989) movement, hybridity and inbetweeness become themselves problematic, particularly when characterizing diaspora identities and politics in overly celebratory terms. This paper discusses critical questions of identity and culture in regards of diaspora politics, mostly if not only in theoretical terms. The first section of this paper centers on presenting the overall terms around which diaspora politics hinge, together with the overall linguistic problematic surrounding such politics. In this sense the median state and the double consciousness that inform diaspora identities and politics is understood as being both a burden and a gift. 67

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Imanol Galfarsoro

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This is particularly evident, it is argued, when addressing concrete questions of linguistic competence, performance and (subaltern) silence with regard to immigration. In this respect, approaches to foreignness may vary depending on how (general) (socio)linguistic theories may be applied; from the classical linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (Structuralism) and Noam Chomsky (Generative and Transformative Linguistics) on to approaches such as Mikhail Bakthin’s regarding dialogic imagination. In addition, however, the linguistic problematic, irremediably linked likewise to current multiculturalist debates, is by no means exhausted with the study of linguistic competence in foreign migrants and diaspora qua border communities. In this respect the dimension of migrant discursivity and/or subaltern silence also allows both shifting as well as expanding the debate into a more general field of (hermeneutical) controversy regarding the construction and articulation of reality through discourse. The discussion on the construction of reality through discourse spills over post-colonial theory’s own propensity to privilege the latter over the former. In this context, the task of the second part of this paper is to continue with a critical appraisal of such notions as hybrid cultures (GARCÍA Canclini, 1995) in regards to diaspora politics and most particularly the migrant experience. Certainly, the notion of hybrid identities invites to think about how cultural positions are negotiated that we occupy outside definite and fixed parameters for all times. This is why likewise, the discourse of hybridity is often associated with the ideas of the Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993; 2003) and travelling cultures (Clifford, 1989), as closely linked to the transnational and diasporic dimension central to critical, cultural and postcolonial theory. In this context, however, the limits of cultural and postcolonial studies must also be exposed. To do so a political critique is produced of travelling theories and postmodern notions of western ‘nomadicism’: surely if the question is resisting domination, this resisting must be located somewhere. As a further counterpoint Slavoj Zizek also addresses directly the shortcomings deriving from an overly celebratory approach to travelling cultures and, particularly, the assumption that ‘multicultural’ migrants may willingly enjoy hybridization.

3. Diaspora politics: median state and linguistic problematic If there is any aspect of migrant, diaspora and subaltern life where the ambiguities and splits of identity and belonging become most manifest, this 68

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is when discussing issues of language. This idea is expressed well by Gloria Anzaldúa: So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity, I am my language. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself… and as long as I have to accommodate… English speakers rather than having them to accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue-my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. (1987: 59)

Evident in Anzaldúa’s quote is a strong element of defiance against the dominant linguistic formation, which structured her own split life (as a Chicana woman, poet, lesbian etc.). Likewise, Anzaldúa’s critical position also speaks of the futility of ideal multiculturalist fantasies seeking frictionless harmonious co-existence through the integration of the different other. Multiculturalism, in this liberal sense, can hardly account for the ambivalent experiences of migrant and exilic fragmentation and withdrawal, namely in the sense addressed below where diaspora identity is understood as being both a burden and a gift.

3.1. The burden and gift of diapora politics: median state and double consciousness Stuart Hall’s depiction of what he named as the new diaspora cultures offers an important theoretical point in regards to diaspora politics. According to Hall, facing the constraining visions and structures of the modern State, diaspora communities are not (and never will be) culturally unified along the lines of a straightforward, single identity membership (1993: 359). Hall claims that the diaspora subject is the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories, and inhabits different “homes” at the same time. Diaspora cultures produce new subjects who must face the issue of modern identity, understood as always under construction, always open, complex and unfinished. According to Hall (362) another rather more practical outcome is that the formation of such new diaspora cultures across the world brings about the possibility of studying new discourses of departure, resettlement and return; discourses, which are then attainable through myriad stories, traditions, books, 69

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Theory, discourse and language: on diaspora politics, migrant voices and subaltern silence

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personal diaries, etc.2; and which, in turn, requires the (methodological) deployment of “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (Gilroy, [1993] 2003: 66).

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Another scholar who shared Hall’s overall position on diaspora politics is late exile Palestinian activist and renown cultural/literary critic Edward Said. They both disagree with the mistaken assumption that being exiled is to be totally separated and isolated from the place of origin. According to Said the diaspora subject, the exile lives “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old” (1994: 36). However, Said also qualifies slightly Hall’s overall optimistic diasporic proposition, mostly when referring to the receiving end of the journey. For according to Said: Once you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness involved in the effort, which scarcely seems worth it. (45)

When Said speaks of the ‘scarce worth’ of such attempts at adaptation into the host society, this does not only apply to newcomers; this also applies to old migrant communities, where the alluded to burden and gift of an informing “double consciousness” retains its grip across generations. It is in this context that Gilroy speaks of the values of emancipatory consciousness and “nomadicism” as expressed, among others, in the works of prolific scholar, sociologist, writer, political activist and pioneer in the struggle for Afro-American and African liberation W.E.B. DuBois. The emancipatory potential stems from being aware of the double nature of the position one occupies as a foreign, migrant, exile or diaspora subject. As Dubois stated already in 1904: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (3)

See, for instance, R. Blackwell. R. King, J. Connell and P. White, 1995.

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In a nutshell, by rethinking culture through diaspora and exile identities, certain naturalising and organic preconceptions conventionally associated with the concept of “culture” as cultivation are definitely contested. As Raymond Williams (1976, 1981) informed us, culture cannot be understood any longer as a coherent and rooted organism that grows and lives in one place, territory, nation, etc, according to some pre-ordained or permanently ordered laws of nature. In this context, the limits of conventional approaches to multiculturalist integration are fairly easily drawn and will not be directly discussed much further in this paper. Yet likewise there are also some rather over-optimistic visions which emerge from critical discourses of diaspora politics, which will be addressed and critically dealt with in due time below. For the time being this paper continues with this particular issue regarding the split and fragmented nature of diaspora identities, which is now most readily focused on the linguistic question as related to diaspora politics through France-based Rumanian literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s work on regards of the foreigner’s subject position.

3.2. Migrancy and the linguistic problematic: voice and silence of the diaspora subject All in all, Edward Said comes closer to the positions held by Julia Kristeva than those of Stuart Hall. Like Hall spoke earlier of different and interrelated cultures and histories in regards of diaspora politics, Julia Kristeva too speaks of “the foreigner [being] lost in the kaleidoscope of his multiple identities” (1988: 57). Yet, for Kristeva, Hall’s new diaspora subject, who is placed in a permanent state of inbetweenness (Said), is not only compelled to inhabit several identities (Hall), often to do so, other languages must also be learnt, and this very process of negotiation and translation between languages becomes a constant source of (dis)enchantment. Emphasizing this particular aspect related to the linguistic problematic, Kristeva reminds us that for the foreigner, once deprived of the attachment to the maternal tongue, the newly learnt foreign languages remain altogether artificial languages, like algebra or solfeggio. As if in a hallucination, the verbal constructions of the foreigner roll on empty space, dislocated from his/her body and passions, and taken hostage by the mother tongue. In this respect, 71

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Theory, discourse and language: on diaspora politics, migrant voices and subaltern silence

Imanol Galfarsoro

according to Kristeva, the foreigner does not really know what (s)he says in the new language. His/her subconscious does not inhabit his/her thoughts and feelings. As a consequence, the language of the foreigner becomes one of an absolute formalism, of an exaggerated sophistication.

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The foreigner’s voice rests on the single strength of his or her naked rhetoric; or else it turns into silence. Placed between different languages the foreigner/diaspora subject’s element becomes silence; but not necessarily a silence imposed upon him/her from the outside (recall here the notion of subaltern silence); instead, this silence refers back to an inner state of being (Kristeva, 1988: 48-49). In order to discuss further the notion of silence together with that of voice in the diaspora subject, it is worthwhile to operate a short detour via the discipline of general and applied linguistics in which, by the same token, some basic presuppositions are also exposed. 3.2.1. Foreignness and (general) (socio)linguistic theory To begin with, instrumental to further frame the already alluded-to context of diaspora duplicity and ambiguity are some basic tenets stemming from the two most important theories in modern general linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structuralism and Noam Chomsky’s Generative and Transformational Grammar. Likewise both these theories account for some clear limits in regards of subaltern linguistic praxis. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) saw language as a system of signs from the relations of which meaning is extracted. He also established a fundamental analytic distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. Saussure acknowledged thereby that speech constitutes the basic informant domain of human experience, yet language as ‘parole’ is not consistent and trustworthy for analysis; in other words, ‘parole’ understood as the multiple manifestations of individual “language games” (recall Wittgenstein, [1953] 2001), or as the actually and intentionally uttered variety of Speech Acts (Searle, 1965, 1969) or as the various practical/pragmatic means by which we learn How to do Things with Words (Austin, 1976), remains too chaotic for coherent and reliable descriptive purposes. Only language as ‘langue’ is to be validated as the very object of linguistic inquiry. ‘Langue’ is ‘the’ objectified social fact rendered

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safe for analysis through the description of stable sign structures within any (synchronically) given linguistic system. Chomsky’s rationalistic and psychological approach to linguistic phenomena is not all that different from Saussure’s. Chomsky only alters the terminology, speaking of ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ instead of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. For Chomsky, performance is carried out through the effective use of language in concrete and specific situations. Nevertheless, what counts for analysis is competence, i.e., the human ‘preprogrammed’ and ‘predetermined’ ability to speak which is embedded in the cognitive capacity of the mind (‘mental organ’). Competence, thereby, is the very condition of language as possibility. As Chomsky points out competence is inherently constitutive of the speaker, it is the ‘innate’ capacity of “an ideal speaker to generate an unlimited sequence of grammatically well-formed sentences” (1965: 3-4). Once these similarities are established, the respective positions of Saussure and Chomsky also enable us to specify an important theoretical problem with regard to their general application to the issue and question of the foreigner’s language, as it were. As it appears, the presuppositions of both modern linguistic theories isolate, and privilege, the configurations of abstract ‘langue’ and idealised ‘competence’ from the actual conditions of their material use as ‘parole’ and ‘performance’ within defined and concrete contexts of verbal interaction. Is it not the case, then, that Saussure and Chomsky do ‘silence voice’ de facto in their respective theories of language? Although the answer to the question would obviously require further in-depth and contrasted debate, the general linguistic theories alluded to also allow for displaying their practical relevance when applied to the particular analytic territory of foreignness. For instance, out of Chomsky’s distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, cognitive anthropologists such as Hymes and Basso formulated the notion of ‘communicative competence’. The concept refers to the speaker’s ability to perform and communicate ‘effectively’ as well as recognising when is it ‘appropriate’ to talk according to a given culturally significant setting of interaction. The ethnographic study of communicative competence comprises, according to Hymes (1972) the analysis of what ‘counts’ as communicative events, the kind of participants, the settings in which communication takes place, the various codes shared by the participants (linguistic, kinesics, musical) and the character of the communicative events as a whole. In such a context, Basso (Giglioli, 1985: 69) also reports that “to give up on words” 73

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and being/remaining silent is itself an activity that may be appropriate on certain occasions. For as the saying goes “it is not the case that a man who is silent says nothing” and therefore “for a stranger entering an alien society, a knowledge of when ‘not’ to speak may be as basic to the production of culturally acceptable behaviour as a knowledge of what to say”.

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For a foreigner, in addition to learning a new language, knowing ‘when not to speak’ or ‘to give up on words’ or when to remain silent is crucial3.

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Kristeva reminded us earlier that to the foreigner, the language newly learned remains a totally artificial language: the foreigner does not really know what (s)he says in the new language since his/her subconscious does not inhabit his/her thoughts and feelings. This is why Kristeva spoke of a kind of silence, which departs both from Basso’s ethnographic advice above as well as, most notably, Gayatri Spivak’s notion of subaltern silence. For Kristeva, the choice of the foreigner is between speaking a new language through the naked rhetoric of a sophistication, which can only be of a register far too formalist4, or else the ultimate recourse of the foreigner remains turning his/her voice into silence. Placed between two languages, the foreigner’s element becomes silence. This is not necessarily a ‘learned’ or culturally-effective silence as

For a more general but always relevant bibliography on questions of socio-linguistics and sociology of language, see (at the macro level-W. Downes, 1984) notions such as that of multilingualism (J. Edwards 1994), and relations between language with class (see Basil Bernstein’s study of “restricted” and “elaborated” codes, 1971-3 (3 vol) and [1971] 1985); or William Lavob’s studies on the Sociolinguisitc Patterns (1972) and “the Logic of Nonstandard English” (1985) in inner city American ghettos; or issues surrounding gender and language (Deborah Cameron [1985] 1992; D. Cameron (ed) 1990 [1998]; Luce Irigaray, 1985, 2004; Jeniffer Coates, 1998, D. Spender, 1980). These speak of a variety of approaches to the (socio)linguistic question which are left unattended here in this study; as so are other factors (at the micro level) such as those related, say, to notions of body language (E. L. Birwhistell,1970; C. Heath, 1986), the understanding of the rules of conversation and turn taking (J. M. Atkinson, J.C. Heritage, 1982; E. Goffman, 1981; M. Moerman, H Sacks, 1971; H. Sacks, E. A. Schegloff, G. Jefferson, 1974; E. A. Schegloff, 1972; E. A. Schegloff, H. Sacks, 1974) or the levels of formality and setting (J. M.Atkinson, 1982; J.M. Atkinson, P. Drew, 1979; R. Dingwall, 1980; F. G. Johnson, C. D Kaplan, 1980). 4 In regards of formalism Kristeva (1988: 28-34) also explained how once deprived of the attachments to the maternal tongue, the individual who learns a foreign language is able to enunciate the most unpredictably daring, bold or audacious statements in the newly acquired means of verbal communication; even to the point that, for the amazement of the native listener, a scatological catalogue of obscenities, too wide and astounding in range to cope with, is reconciled nevertheless, with much admired formal stylistic variations of elaborated verve. 3

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suggested by Basso, but rather a silence imposed upon him/her from the outside. It is, however, one which refers back, as Kristeva said, to an inner state of being, which is thus also different from the silence theorised in subaltern studies whereby, for Gayatri Spivak (1988), ‘silence’ refers to a condition of both ‘structural’ and collective subordination.

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In general terms, Kristeva’s poignant approach above invites the study of such concepts as ‘voice’ and ‘silence’ from both the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic paradigms: what are the relationships between language and thought that underlie the diaspora subject’s necessarily split/fractured linguistic behaviour? Is it true that the brain’s control over the processes of speech and understanding constitutes —all things cognitive, or mind related, considered— an insurmountable impediment for a really fulfilling acquisition, development and use of a new language? Pointing to another level of inquiry, Kristeva’s position also raises questions regarding style and register: what is it that makes a foreigner or a diaspora subject express him/ herself as much in an elegant as in a clumsy way, both in a refined and in a vulgar way, in a convoluted/circuitous way and in a straightforward/perspicuous way? How is it that (s)he may appear so modest and pretentious at the same time?

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While addressing part of the same problematic (i.e.: the relationships between consciousness, identity and language) Stuart Hall’s work on diaspora or Edward Said’s approach to exile identity could be quickly brought in again as their emphasis shifts towards broader issues that take more of a cultural and social dimension. Kristeva’s perspective is individual rather than collective and involves a vision whereby the late learning of a new language becomes, inevitably, a “source of estrangement”, a source of disaffection, split and withdrawal leading to the “silence of the polyglot”. Hall’s standpoint is also aware of the fragile and ambivalent communicative position occupied by the individual members of different diaspora communities; yet this very ambivalent duplicity characterising the diaspora subject’s cultural and linguistic identity also encourages to explore another series of connections from a more optimistic angle than even Said would allowed for; and if there is one such line of work that falls into this category that is Marxist critic Mikhail Bakthin’s linguistic approach.

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It is in the context of dealing with standard linguistic theories and the issue of language and silence in the (subaltern) foreigner, that the validity of Bakthin’s “heteroglossic” approach to the “dialogic imagination” must be reasserted. Bakthin formulated a systematic linguistic philosophy ([1929] 1973) based both on the social character and the dialogic nature of language. Within the context of such philosophy elicited early in the twentieth century, his key term of ‘heteroglossia’ referred to a world that had already become “polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly”; to a period when “national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other (had come) to an end” (Holquist, Emerson,1981:12). All in all, the polyphonic heteroglossia of Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination is made up of the following features: it originates from dialogue; it is not unique, uniform, finished or pre-decided. As it stems from dialogue it is heterogeneous, unfinished and open-ended. It exists through doubt although it aims at being decisive since ideology always seeks truth and socially rooted values. It exists for and through words and through concrete authors within given contexts. It is abstract but materializes itself in concrete life. It is not completely objective since it keeps subjective references. It is understood rationally but also emotionally, and contextually. It is totalizing because it enacts a worldview in its totality, but it is anti-dogmatic because it allows counterpoints and remains open. In accordance with this overall dialogic predicament, it can also be argued that the concept of ‘heteroglossia’ not only ushers the diaspora-migrant subject into a myriad new cultural and linguistic possibilities. Likewise it also breaks through much monologic discourse of nationhood (one nation = one language) in ways that acute cultural critics such as Paul Gilroy or James Clifford will not fail to point out.

4. On hybrid cultures and travelling theories The seminal works of such authors as James Clifford and Paul Gilroy on diaspora politics, the spirit of nomadicism and travelling cultures, etc. follow the path of works already alluded to, such as those of Stuart Hall or Edward Said. In addition further works on hybridization by, say, Kobena Mercer or 76

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Néstor GARCÍA Canclini as well as Arjun Appadurai on globalization also account for just as much a critical as a rather optimistic period in the 1990s. In this particular moment critical discussions and ideas of cultural politics defined along the formation of myriad political subjectivities and pluralised identity politics (gender, ethnicity, class, etc.) moved away from traditional (homogenizing, essentialist and elitist) understandings of culture, and allowed a more dynamic, trans-national understanding of radical cultural politics. Beyond the cultural formations contained in particular nation-states globalisation, in that context, spoke of a re-organisation and adaptation of these Western (imperial/colonial) nation-states into the pressing requirements of transnational cultural and economic flows. In a context of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000) a variegated array of hybrid cultures (GARCÍA Canclini, [1992] 1995) had to proceed under the disjunctive conditions (Appadurai, 1990, 1996) of global transnational cultural transactions. These, in addition, had certainly and must still be apprehended within the overarching coordinates of an all-embracing world system qua capitalist-world economy (Wallerstein, 1974, 1979, 1990a/b; Featherstone, 1990).

4.1. Globalisation, desire and the Imaginary: on ships and hotels When discussing globalization and rethinking in this way the dialectical relations between the global and the local, Appadurai pointed out that such reflections should not be undercut by a cultural fear of homogenization: Globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localizing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization, and to the extent that different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently, there is still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories, and languages. (1996:16-17)

Within this context of an ever increasing process of (post)modern globalization, intellectual belief was widespread, in the 1990s, that the future of nation-states was rather bleak. As Appadurai himself claimed: The nation-state has entered a “terminal crisis” and an “important new feature of global cultural politics…is that state and nation are at each other’s throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture. (1996: 7) 77

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This belief in the crisis of the nation-state also linked up with Appadurai’s ([1990] 2003) own main thesis. This thesis spoke of five different types of imagined world landscapes both explaining the nature of cultural flows in the global economy as well as undermining, in turn, the future viability of nation-states. These were: ethnoscapes (people who move between nations, such as tourists, immigrants, exiles, guest-workers, and refugees), technoscapes (technology, often linked to multinational corporations), financescapes (global capital, currency markets, stock exchanges), mediascapes (electronic and new media), and ideoscapes (official state-ideologies and counter-ideologies). In this respect, Appadurai’s work on the variegated interrelationships among these world landscapes was also particularly instrumental on two accounts at least: it carried with it an understanding of how diaspora, migrant and exile ethnoscapes re-position themselves in and around the world; it also articulated a view of cultural processes understood as the outcome and product of the imaginary, a notion that encompasses both the image (say, of mediascapes) and the imagined (of ideoscapes), and which according to Appadurai constitute “terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice”. (2003: 31). It is precisely talking of imagination as a social practice that it is worthwhile recalling some of the concrete political desires invested in, and articulated through the critical exercise of relating culture to the processes of travelling and transnational diaspora formation. As culture was reworked and reformulated as the outcome of transnational flows taking place in the open realms of globalization, this also required a change in the very imagery used. In other words, it required to overcome long-standing views of culture as constituting and supporting organically harmonious and locally —bound entities in turn cohabiting with, and indeed within, the confines of the nation— (State). Instead images and metaphors of the ship and the hotel invoked in the diasporic approaches of Paul Gilroy to the Black Atlantic and of James Clifford to the idea of traveling cultures reflected better the new mood of the times. 4.1.1. Black Atlantic, “Nomadicism” and the image of the ship Paul Gilroy defined the black Atlantic through a desire to transcend state/ national identifications. This desire, which is also relevant to understanding the need of cultural criticism and political “interventionist” practice, called for a critique of “cultural insiderism” (2003: 52). According to Gilroy, insi78

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derism defines the explanations of modernity developed in Western thought by means of which identity is ‘fixed’ through privileging nations (or camps) as the main container for cultural and political identification. This brings about “the problem of weighting the claims to national identity against other contrasting varieties of subjectivity and identification” (Gilroy, 2003: 66.) For Gilroy, the question of allegiances along national lines is not only a problem which can be found in standard hegemonic understandings of national identity but also in subordinate re-articulations of counter-hegemonic political and cultural intervention. Gilroy’s overall political aim and ideal is to transcend “both the structures of the nation-state but also the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (ibid). In this respect, Gilroy’s position remained at the time very critical on English cultural studies, as he puts it, and the politics of the New Left that preceded it. For Gilroy, not only did the cultural politics of the English Left, as it were, rely on “the statist modalities of Marxist analysis that view modes of material production and political domination as exclusively national entities” (2003: 52). At the same time, the New Left and early cultural studies were explicitly framed within the view or “dream of socialism in one country” (62); and also at a more implicit level, “the quiet cultural nationalism [crypto-nationalism] which pervade[d] the work of some radical thinkers [was] more evasive but nonetheless potent for its intangible ubiquity” (52). This constitutes therefore a good reminder that what Michael Billig (1995) called banal nationalism and which is also part and parcel of the tradition of Left politics articulated around the ‘reality’ of nation-states. Yet in regards of Gilroy himself, it is worth remembering that his was not only a critique directly addressed against the British Left as well as, more dramatically, the very fathers, as it were, of cultural studies (e.g., Williams, Thompson, Hoggart). In addition, Gilroy’s best-known and perhaps harsher criticism, which is key to his entire work5, deals more particularly with the forms of ‘ethnic absolutism’ In this respect, Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” sits in-between another classic of cultural studies “It Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and nation” (1992) and “Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allures of Race” (2000). While the former deploys a severe critique against both ethnocentric British cultural studies, as it were, as well as the racist attitudes in Britain regardless of the right/left political divide, in the latter Gilroy continues to suggest the idea of diaspora as a tool to overcome life in entrenched camps (nations). Simultaneously, Gilroy’s search is also on for a more global and unifying “planetary humanism” transcending both liberal humanism and over-indulgence on the politics

5

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taking place within black communities themselves. As Janna Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur put it Gilroy disputes “African diasporic conceptions […] portraying African diasporic individuals everywhere —scattered across several continents— as linked by a common heritage, history and racial descent” (2003: 4). In other words, Gilroy addresses the issue of Black nationalist strategies that emerge in the diaspora itself by contesting the Afro-centric perspective and the idea that Africa provides diaspora black peoples with the possibility of a return to some sense of a unifying past origin and a true, authentic pre-modern homeland. All in all, it is by setting himself against both ethnic and state-national absolutist temptations of fixing identity that Gilroy suggests taking “the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis” (1993: 66) instead of locating any particular tradition within the confines of particular territorial boundaries. As a consequence, this approach also calls for the already alluded to deployment of “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective”, (ibid) which seeks “de-homogenising difference” while endeavouring to produce alternative readings of globalised modernity/modernisation understood as a dynamic, fluid and nomadic process. The Atlantic accounts for “temporary experiences of exile, relocation and displacement” (65) which are not only crucial to the understanding of concrete black historical struggles (for emancipation from slavery, for political and social rights, for seeking an ‘independent’ space) but are also crucial to understand modernity itself, a process which is not restricted to black experiences alone. Finally, Gilroy also looks for a tradition that may better underpin the notion of the Atlantic through both the marginal politics of black “nomadicism” and emancipatory consciousness, and finds that sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and writer Richard Wright’s respective notions of “double consciousness” and “double motion” reflect the extent to which peoples (black and otherwise) live “in-between” nations and nationalisms. This state of in-between-ness also speaks of the “nomadicism” inherent to the migrant, exile and diaspora experience of double consciousness, which

of difference. Although emphasis shifts from one work to the other, all three books remain constant in exploring the relations among race, class and nation within the evolving historical context of modernity as product and outcome of the Western enlightenment project. 80

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Gilroy represents, both metaphorically and literally, by focusing on the image of the ship. According to Gilroy: The ship embod[ies] the Middle Passage between territories as epitomised by the Black Atlantic. The ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the Western hemisphere (1993: 64).

By speaking of the ship in this manner Gilroy also states specifically that he follows “the venturesome spirit proposed by James Clifford in his influential work on travelling culture” (17). 4.1.2. Travelling cultures, hotels and contingent knowledge As Gilroy points out, James Clifford is known for his work on the topic of Traveling Cultures (1992, 1997). If Gilroy focuses on the image of the ship, Clifford invokes instead the image (chronotope) of the “hotel” as closely and especially intertwined with travel vocabularies and metaphors: “The hotel epitomizes a specific way into complex histories of travelling cultures (and cultures of travel) in the late twenty century” (1992: 105). The hotel —see also M. Morris (1988a) on the motel— is a place of transit, not of residence. It is both a “launching point for strange and wonderful voyages […] a place of collection, juxtaposition and passionate encounter” and “somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary […] as a station, airport terminal, hospital and so on” (96). Clifford specifies that the concept of the ‘hotel’ does not refer only to a simple description of a physical space; it also works as a research tool for interpretation. Yet, at the same time, this metaphor of the hotel as an organising research-image is necessarily ambivalent. On the one hand it represents the moving and provisional nature of the travelling experience understood as a process; on the other hand, it allows looking to the past and recollect traces and vestiges of travel histories whereby class, gender and race relations of inequality and privilege become pervasive. According to Clifford, the notion of travelling is handled in two different ways within the field of anthropology. First, the ethnographer moves in the literal sense to the extent that he or she must leave home in order to carry out research work: “Ethnographers, typically, are travellers who like to stay and dig in (for a time), who like to 81

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make a second home/workplace” (99). Secondly, at the epistemological level, the ethnographer finds the need to describe knowledge as contingent and partial: “Every focus excludes; there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation” (97). All in all, the object of travelling cultures is to rethink culture in terms of journey and travel. The subject of the travelling experience conveys the idea that the notions of mobility, fluidity and process are more suitable than the notions of stability, solidity and fixity in order to express the dynamic character of human cultural practice. It is in this sense that, as stated earlier, standard multiculturalist ideals based on seeking frictionless co-existence through the harmonious integration of the different other within the structures of a given nation-state hardly account for the various conflicting identities informing migrant and exilic experiences of fragmentation and withdrawal, as both Julia Kristeva and Edward W. Said pointed out earlier on.

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4.2. Cultural, political and social critique of travelling theories and ‘hybridization’ James Clifford addressed above both sides of the travelling equation, that of theory and that of practice. According to Clifford (1989: 177), theory is the product of displacement, a product, namely, of comparison and distance. This is a point that Clifford repeats from Edward Said’s article “Travelling theory”. In this article Said shows how easily theories travel: Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel, from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas, and whether it takes the form of unacknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual life. (1983: 226)

Theories travel in space and time. The interpretations of theory change according to different historic and political contexts. On this account, since theories travel, it is still justifiable to ask what happens to knowledge as it travels: where is it that critical discourses travel? Where are they directed towards and how does one’s own appropriation of a particular theory affect 82

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the substance of theory itself once it is transposed to a different universe? As an informing curiosity, perhaps, Slavoj Žižek (2007: 4), for instance, gives a good example of this when referring to Georgi M. Derlugian’s book Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005). In this book, the story is told of how, in the “turbulent region” of Abkhazia, Pierre Bourdieu’s thought was central to Musa Shanib, a leading intellectual and respected professor of philosophy, formerly also a “Soviet dissident intellectual, democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist warlord” (ibid.). According to Žižek, two wrong ways of approaching this occurrence would be either to dismiss it as a local eccentricity with a touch of Western benevolent irony, or to directly assert the universal scope of theory. On the contrary, the true task would be to assert the universality of theory (yes, every intellectual from Paris to Chechnya can debate Bourdieu) but only in so far as “theory is seen as the result of hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory” (ibid). 4.2.1. A cultural critique of cultural studies On account of the above another “closer” instance to the issue of “travelling” theories refers to an important critique regarding the rather AngloSaxon character of cultural and post-colonial studies as a whole. Right at the outset of this paper chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua’s misgivings were already mentioned in regards English, which she identified as both dominant and oppressive language. In the context of this critique which stems from other area studies (Hispanic, Latin-American, etc.) it can be said that cultural studies certainly “travels” across intellectual/academic traditions, territories and times from its original British/English location on to the wider Anglo-Saxon space (United States, etc.) and indeed elsewhere in the world. Yet, on this very point this can also be argued, namely that the initial external nature of cultural studies with regard to other areas of study or fields of inquiry within the humanities and the social sciences has eventually diluted. This is the case as the taste for collaborative scholarship crossing disciplinary boundaries has grown over the years. Yet the same appears not to be so regarding the external character of cultural studies beyond its original English-centric dimension. As Joseba Gabilondo maintains (1999: 231-232; translations from Spanish added) the original “[B]ritish character” and posterior “reception, celebration and canonization of cultural studies in the United States” is in part accounted for in terms of the “linguistic continuity of English”. For Gabilondo, this explains first the unconscious nature of cultural studies as rooted in Anglo83

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Saxon monolingual discourse as well as it also helps understanding the limits and political effects of the “linguistic, theoretical and geopolitical unity of British cultural studies”, which should be rethought and interrogated since all other non-English speaking fields “continue to be objects of study but not of dialogue and theoretical production” (ibid).

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4.2.2. A political critique of traveling theories and the theories of nomadicism from the margins and the borderlands Simultaneously and regardless now of the specific “(inter)national language” used, an additional question must also be specifically asked as to how the “language of theory” moves around. More concretely, the issue revolves around the ultimate scope of the alluded circulation of ideas. In this sense, as feminist critique Janet Wolff showed, there is also room for scepticism about the actual nature of theoretical mobility. In fact, according to Wolff “[T]he fact that theories sometimes travel (and therefore mutate) does not mean that theory (transported or not) is essentially itinerant” (1992: 226). Wolff’s concern seems to be that however far critical theory “itinerates” both in time and in space, this does not mean critical theory is an effective tool in itself for social change to occur out there. Wolff, therefore, is doubtful about the validity of such travelling theories as that developed by Clifford but also Paul Gilroy and others. For instance, Clifford says he chooses the concept of “travel” as the more appropriate to the needs of this particular domain of cultural enquiry and criticism, for “travel” is endowed with the possibility of a more general application than other related terms such as “displacement”, “tourism”, “migration”, “pilgrimage” or “nomadism”6.

For books on various aspects of historical and contemporary travel, on the tourist gaze/mind and global leisurely consumption of the other, cosmopolitanism, nomadism and migration in globalisation etc, see E. J. Leed, (1991) D. MacCannell, (1976,1989) and J. Urry, (1991); on women travellers M. Russell (1988) and on Victorian Lady explorers, D, Middleton, (1965) and D. Birket, (1991); see also U. Hannerz, (1990) on the debate between cosmopolitanism and local culture as well as M Rediker, (1987) on Sea Merchants and Pirates or E. Escobar (1994:45) on prisoners: “you can end up traveling from prison to prison through the nation with no fixed destination”. See also R. King, J. Connell, J. White (1995) on Literature and Migration, J. Kristeva, 1988; M Morris (1988, 1992); M. Russell, 1988; E. W. Said, 1994; J. Urry, 1991; J. Wolff, 1992.

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In addition to Gilroy’s mention of the Atlantic (1993) as yet another instance of nomadicism, the idea itself of the “nomadic subject” stems from, and is usually related to certain forms of post-structuralist thinking (Deleuze, 1977) with which both Clifford and Gilroy are duly acquainted. A main ontological proposition deriving from this overall poststructuralist paradigm underlines the necessity to theorise and re-present the emergence of a “de-centred”, fluid, fragmented and provisional subject, which deserves close attention to the extent that the notions of a unitary, homogeneous and universal-transcendental subject formation are “un-fixed”. Yet as emphasis is placed on a sense of permanent mobility, fluidity and process conveyed by the experience of nomadic travelling, room for scepticism soon widens again. The crucial point here is that far too superficial an understanding of nomadic wandering and hybridity leads to an interesting paradox: is it not that by way of never being in one place and always being “in-between places”, comfort and refuge may be sought in this very constant “state of inbetweenness” with indeed, little of the adventure, risking and daring that Edward Said would demand from an exiled spirit, involved in the process? In this respect, to the extent that Edward Said was a Palestinian intellectual in exile, he was likewise extremely demanding on himself: “there is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can too easily become accustomed” (1994: 43). With no possible evasion from the necessity of continuous self-assessment, appeals to the nomadic and the hybrid become problematic on one main account. Nomadic exaltations of travel often rely on a well-known mystification of journeying conceived of as free movement. Within the context of Western nomadic journeying any sense of constraint is lost. The compelling reality of travel as compulsory voyaging and asymmetrical cultural exchange disappears from analysis. Thereby even the notion of hybridity is often reduced to describing instances of superficial cultural “intermingling” among different others, so to speak. In short, while notions of fixity and solidity may be challenged, the problem still remains that yet another acute question by Janet Wolff (1992: 235) 85

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must be answered: “How is it that metaphors of movement and mobility, often invoked in the context of radical projects of destabilizing discourses of power, can have conservative effects?” At the time it seemed only legitimate to think that whatever remained of a possibility to develop coherent projects of social change could only benefit from participating in a critique of stasis. However, the issue once was, and still remains nowadays, that for a political critique to take place it must be also located somewhere. As Wolff continued:

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I think that destabilizing has to be situated, if the critic is not to self-destruct in the process. The problem with terms like ‘nomad’, ‘maps’ and ‘travel’ is that they are not usually located, and hence (and purposely) they suggest ungrounded and unbounded movement, since the whole point is to resist fixed selves/viewers/ subjects. But the consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception, since we don’t all have the same access to the road. (ibid)

It must also be said that Deleuze’s own work on “nomadic thought” had little to do with the idea of free, ungrounded and/or unbounded travel. For Deleuze, being, feeling and acting as a “nomad” keeps a precise political dimension. Nomadicism, for Deleuze, means opposition to central power (See also Foucault, Deleuze, 1979). It was in this sense that Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1980) notion of Rhizome and the “rhizomatic” accounted for, and offered the possibility of generating some form of nomadic symbolic (dis) order, as it were; a symbolic (dis)order whereby connectivity, heterogeneity and multiplicity constituted valid principles from and with which to articulate resistance and challenge both Western nomadic exaltations of postmodern mobility and innocent liberal visions of multicultural traveling, understood as the process of joyful journeying seeking to meet the quaint other7. Against this, the Deleuzian idea of nomadicism also equates to the idea that displaced (groups of) people are able to contest authority and develop a critique that originates from a particular place, the margins, the edges, the less visible spaces.

By qualifying the nomadic-postmodern as “western” it is also meant that forms of traditional nomadic travelling are rather subjected to fixed and repetitive itineraries. In other words, unless external factors enter into the equation the few remaining “authentic” nomads are people moving from one place to another on a very routine and custom-led basis. This can be seen, for instance, in Smadar Lavie’s ethnographic monograph (1990) on Bedouin identity moving across borders under Israeli and Egyptian rule”. Here it is clearly shown that the actual “traditional” nomadic experience of the Bedouin people in the “South” hardly fits the postmodernist metaphoric meaning extension of the original concept.

7

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Here the margins and edges that Gloria Anzaldua located in a concrete space, the Borderlands, also comes to mind again. Worth repeating is how Anzaldua self-consciously vindicated her “‘mestiza” subject position: a lesbian and feminist woman of white, Mexican and Indian descent. In this instance then, the borderlands constitute that space in which subordinate experiences of subaltern people from different cultures, races, classes, and sexual orientations are both embraced and endorsed in a way both trustfully committed yet simultaneously critically problematized that the bland liberal multiculturalist notions of integration pervading dominant discourses nowadays can hardly account for. In this overall context, hence, the necessity still remains to retain a particular “structure of feeling” (Williams) which privileges “restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others” as Edward Said put it (1994: 39), and which over the notion of stasis and “the comforts of privilege, power (and) being-at-homeness, so to speak” (43-44)” also favours the margins and the edges. 4.2.3. A social critique of “hybridization” or on why one should never tell a migrant worker to enjoy and celebrate “hybridity” When discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas it was mentioned how their conceptual universe (rhizome, nomadicism….) offered the possibility of generating forms of symbolic (dis)order. On this account albeit linked to more recent debates, it is perhaps no coincidence if Michael Hardt and Tony Negri also embrace this notion of the rhizome(atic) in Empire (2000) whereby the “Multitude” (2004) itself grows out in a multiplicity of non-hierarchical, non-structured and anarchic-libertarian ways of reappropriating from private property the stolen wealth of the commons or the Commonwealth (2009). As the rhizome works through horizontal and hybrid connections, it is then no wonder either if the terms of a very classic debate within the Left are re-enacted nowadays under the guise of thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, having to take the opposite provocative stance against Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, and hence in favour of a more “authoritarian” form, as it were, of framing radical political practice: discipline, orthodoxy, verticality… Here, it is also perhaps worth recalling, as a rather ironic counterpoint, that Žižek 87

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himself shows how not least than Israeli military academies systematically use Deleuze and Gattari’s works against Palestinian insurgency:

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It was recently made public that, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to Thousand Plateaux, using it as “operational theory”, the catchwords used are “Formless Rival Entities”, “Fractal Manoeuvre”, “Velocity vs. Rhythms”, “The Wahabi War Machine”, “Postmodern Anarchists”, “Nomadic Terrorists”. One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between “smooth” and “striated” space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. The IDF now often uses the term “to smooth out space” when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on (n/d)

Along the same ironic lines of critical questioning, quite telling is also Žižek’s (1999: 220) interrogation of the validity of the intellectual approaches associated with praising the ideas of hybridity and travelling cultures at any cost: It is easy to praise the hybridity of the postmodern migrant worker, no longer attached to specific ethnic roots, floating freely between different cultural circles. Unfortunately, two totally different sociopolitical levels are condensed here: on the one hand the cosmopolitan upper- and upper-middle-class academic, always with the proper visas enabling him to cross borders without any problem in order to carry out his (financial, academic…) business, and thus able to ‘enjoy the difference’; on the other hand the poor (im)migrant worker driven from his home by poverty or (ethnic, religious) violence, for whom the celebrated ‘hybridity’ designates a very tangible traumatic experience of never being able to settle down properly and legalize his status, the subject for whom such simple task as crossing a border or reuniting with his family can be an experience full of anxiety, and demanding great effort. For this second subject, being uprooted from his traditional way of life is a traumatic shock which destabilizes his entire existence, to tell him that he should enjoy the hybridity and the lack of fixed identity of his daily life, the fact that his existence is migrant, never identical-to-itself, and so on, involves [a clear] cynicism. (ibid)

With this approach, Žižek certainly goes not only beyond Stuart Hall’s own critique against notions of “trendy postmodernist voyaging” (1993: 356); simultaneously, Žižek’s as ironic as merciless critique is also meant to dismiss the very validity of the critical work stemming from self-appointed cosmopo88

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litan academic practitioners within the fields of critical theory and cultural studies. As Žižek points out, the notion of hybridisation and the realms of hybrid politics are certainly problematic. Although it must also be stressed that the widely used discourse of hybridity constitutes a more disputed terrain of cultural theory and criticism than Žižek himself gives credit for. For instance, as Néstor GARCÍA Canclini insists (1990, 1995) hybrid cultures and the processes of hybridisation are multidirectional; they do not only refer to a fruitful process of cultural exchange and quaint cross-fertilisation. On the contrary, hybrid cultures and hybridisation can also serve the purpose of reinforcing existing asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination. In other words, the realms of hybrid politics can obviously speak a positive language that seeks to challenge essentialism and homogeneity. On the other hand, certain modalities of hybridisation may take the form of undesired fusion and enforced integration of a given subordinate unit into a larger dominant formation. Overall, therefore, it must be admitted that the notion of “hybridization” has lost most of its initial aura to signify a process of cultural defiance to the dominant and renewal from below. In his article “A Sociography of Diaspora”, Kobena Mercer refers to this question when explaining how the notion of hybridity has lost most of his heuristic or explanatory strength as it has been appropriated from above and incorporated (co-opted) into the dominant discourse of the liberal nation-state. According to Mercer, the “multicultural normalization” that follows also accelerates the process whereby “hybridity has spun through the fashion cycle so rapidly that it has come to the other end looking wet and soggy” (2000: 235).

5. Conclusion The double consciousness informing diaspora politics makes it compelling to foreign/migrant/exile subjects to struggle on the edges of modern fragmented identities. Diaspora politics also speaks of the risky urge to dissociate oneself from a sense of the obvious and the need to undercut the desires to entertain a close relationship with a place of origin. Diaspora politics, in this sense, is the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories whereby different “homes” and “languages” are necessarily inhabited at the same time. 89

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ally

Theory, discourse and language: on diaspora politics, migrant voices and subaltern silence

Imanol Galfarsoro

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In this paper Edward Said spoke of migrant exiles existing in a median state and underlined the awkwardness involved in the exercise of integration into the host culture. W.E.B. DuBois was also mentioned and so was his key notion of “double consciousness” which he understood as a burden on Black subordinate identities. Stuart Hall, on the other hand, also saw it as a gift so diaspora cultures can blossom across identities. For as he also pointed out the very “twoness” of the migrant, exile etc., means that foreign qua alien nationals are compelled not only to deal at least with two cultural identities but also, frequently, to speak, translate and negotiate between at least two languages. In this sense, a function of this paper was also to act as a counterpoint to the view often held that a nation (state) is irremediably associated with one major and dominant language. Against this vision, according to which a main national language is felt as key and necessary to integration, some specific linguistic issues were addressed (heteroglossia, voice, silence) which focused upon the rather more complexly de- and/or re-territorialised qua diasporic/ exilic/migrant dynamics impinging on the formation of hybrid identities and travelling cultures within and between established nation-states. Hence the overall linguistic problematic has been revisited as particularly applied to the complexity informing the “dialogic imagination” of the foreigner. It must be said that regarding the question of diaspora politics, in the critical tradition of cultural and postcolonial studies emphasis and allegiances tended to privilege the perspective of the foreigner, the exile, the migrant etc., at the expense of the receiving state, society or culture where the injunction to integrate prevails which will always generate uneasiness. It is in this context that reference has also been made to how, against traditional visions of “rooted” cultures and communities, the formation of new “routed” cultures and communities across the world also brings about new possibilities for critical enquiry and research. In addition, the travelling motive and the theme of hybridization haven been duly elaborated within this context of migrant and diaspora politics; albeit also with the aim of revealing some inherent limits (theoretical, cultural, political, social) deriving from placing excessive emphasis on un-situated movement as is often the case in (transnational) cultural and postcolonial studies. When dealing with the specific topic of travelling cultures, obvious shortcomings also arise from those overall politics, which tend(ed) to involve an all-out emphasis on mobility. In times where we are witnessing truly voice90

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less, subaltern migrant workers who traverse the globe in search of economic survival, these specific and concrete migrant experiences cannot be collapsed into some universal discourse on the intrinsic virtues of migrant hybrid nomadicism of sorts. Undoubtedly, there is room to say that the discourse of hybridity still permits the articulation of a series of contradictory reflections, beliefs, desires and also political projects from below. Identity cannot be solely understood as the outcome of a single cultural heritage. Identity, in addition, is not only cultural. In fact it can only be constructed in political terms. In this context, the notion of hybridity serves to generate ambivalence and contradiction with regard to one’s own traditions and cultural identity. Yet, at the same time, over-celebratory accounts of hybrid cultures and un-grounded travelling may also be misleading. Anthropologist Adan Kuper allows us now to conclude this paper in such a way rather humorous that sees culture and, by extension traveling cultures, as something perhaps less complex that we often want to make up for: It goes without saying that culture means something rather different to market researchers in London, a Japanese mogul, New Guinean villagers, and a radical clergyman in Teheran, not to mention Samuel Huntignton. There is nevertheless a family resemblance between the concepts they have in mind. In its most general sense, culture is simply a way of talking about collective identities. Status is also in play, however. Many people believe that cultures can be means used against each other, and they are inclined to esteem their own culture more highly than that of others. They may even believe that there is only one true civilization, and that the future not only of the nation but of the world depends on the survival of their culture. (1993: 3)

On reading this it is easy to understand that there is less of a clash of civilisations that Samuel Huntington would hope for between a market researcher in London and a Japanese mogul, not least to the very extent that, on account of the space devoted here to the idea travelling cultures nothing in Kuper’s comment prevents one from thinking that the former could easily be the son of the latter. Works Cited ANZALDUA, Gloria (1987). Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco, Spingsters/Aunt Lute. ATXAGA, Bernardo ([1988] 1993). Obabakoak, Pantheon Books, UK. 91

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