Unpacking colonialism

A two-day conversation in Texas last fall brought together scholars and artists from around the world to explore and interrogate the relationship between exile and representations of "home" Hamid Naficy, individual of the conference's organizers, explained in his opening remarks that the discourse title - " House, dwelling Homeland" - was chosen because it give an inkling ofs movement between one's literal house to mythical conceptions of home and nationality. He spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed that the conference would avoid any privileged definition of what is or who is "the exile."

The symposium organizers' ambitious plan to disrupt established formats of "gathering" (such as panel presentations) included the following innovative presentations and installations: a semester-long screening of the "cinema of displacement," featuring films of that kind as Exiles (1990, by Richard Kaplan), Nostalgia (1983 Andrei Tarkovsky), Paris, Texas (1984 by dint of Wire Wenders) and Paris is Burning (1991 by dint of Jennie Livingston); an installation by means of artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena, James Luna and Roberto Sifuentes (with Sifuentes as a digitized Chicano persona known as "CyberVato," who, in his subversive part as the "Information Superhighway Bandito," engages viewers interactively via the Internet upon topics ranging from Chiapas to Affirmative Action to NAFTA); David Chung's "Turtle Boat Head," a multimedia installation at the Rice University Art Gallery that examines the cultural disjointedness felt by means of a Korean emigre whose wall-sized murals fuse images of a Korean past and at hand with the immigrant's visions of his origin and general home.

As these performances and installations refer to one of the aims of the discourse was to erase disciplinary boundaries between the "artistic" and the "scholarly." For example, in the inaugural panel "History, Subjectivity, Identity," Ella Shohat's analysis of the Internet ignited wide-ranging speculation about the imaginary horizons created through the World Wide Web and its deployment of cyberspace as a of recent origin frontier. Populist celebrations of the "information highway," Shohat argued, belie the restrictive nature of the medium, a medium that despite democratic rhetoric is structur by means of government agencies, corporate entities and financial a whole s Complementing Shohat's presentation, a later panel titled "Home in the World" discussed the fresh technologies of acceleration - tele-satellite link-ups and the Internet - as media [i]or[/i] part of to the other which "exilic subjects" create novel transnational communities even as they imagine novel positions from which to perceive their displacement and following longings for home.

The panel presentations showed the interdisciplinary affects that could congregate around the use of "exile," not sole as alienation from a geographical locality, on the contrary as a longing for form and as the inevitable impossibility of being at abiding-place with language. A panel upon "Representing Women" used the figure of speechs of home and the material substance to open up questions of sex displacements and the possibility of constituting a feminist self in scenarios of colonial violence and other ethnographic clashs Another panel, "Worlded by Music," discussed the character of music in constructing memories for the late world. The place of architecture in producing domestic spaces and the transplantation of "alien" memories and histories in contemporary cityscapes were addressed in the panel "Home upon the Range." Lastly, film studies and art history framed the discussions in "Synaesthesia of abode and Identity" and "Migrating Art," respectively.

Although the symposium provided a unique opportunity for artists and scholars from many disciplines to congregate around "House, dwelling Homeland," the keynote address through Homi Bhabha warned against a dilution of the meaning of exile. In his discourse "The Ethics and Politics of Exile" (jointly sponsored by the agency of Rice University's Presidential Lecture Series and the American Film Institute), Bhabha called for a "war of recognition" as a means to cultural survival. Maintaining that similar struggles persist in unrecognizable forms, he recod "exile" in metes of deconstructionist and psychoanalytic strategies that unmask the ideological conformations that disguise and suppress "exile" and "the exiled" from at any time becoming a threat to the status quo of Western society. Exile, Bhabha argued, is at one time an enforced displacement or dislocation, and is, at least potentially, a productive alienation from dominant digests of meaning. In this next to the first sense, exile could function as an opportunity to impel beyond the discourses of modernity. Approaching colonialism as the "unthought of western history," including its limits, brings the "exile" back place of abode Bhabha re-read postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon to exhibit that "hybridization" is not a of recent origin term, but a recognition of proximity between the colonizer and the colonized.

Bhabha's address also raised the issue of "difficulty" or "inaccessibility." Lack of clarity, the pair conceptual and stylistic, has become a familiar charge horizontaled against Bhabha in particular, and postcolonial criticism in general. In a significant twinkling at the beginning of his talk, Bhabha compared his composed of several elements theoretical vocabulary with the adamantly difficult film-making techniques of Peter Gidal (who bases his aesthetic upon audience resistance). The comparison brought up thorny questions of who and what is "difficult," and for whom and where it is difficult.