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The Poetics and Politics of Identity at the Crossroads Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies E-ISSN: 2175-8026 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Brasil Walter, Roland THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF IDENTITY AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND DIVERSITY Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, núm. 48, enero-junio, 2005, pp. 115-134 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=478348686005 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative The poetics and politics... 115 THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF IDENTITY AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND DIVERSITY Roland Walter Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Abstract This essay traces the relational dynamics of cultural difference and diver- sity as represented in Pan-American fiction by Gisèle Pineau, Maryse Condé, Dionne Brand, T. C. Boyle, Conceição Evaristo, and Alejo Carpentier. In the process, it addresses and problematizes the following questions: How is identity constituted, produced, and enacted when iden- tity-based forms of oppression deny or delimit the negotiation and com- prehension of its meanings? How do difference and diversity designate the other? How are boundaries of difference and borderlands of diversity constituted, maintained or deconstructed? And finally, if these bound- aries and borderlands constitute the space of power relations where iden- tifications are performed, then, what are their effects on the formation of identity? Keywords: cultural identity; cultural difference (as separation); cultural diversity (as relation); transculturation, mangrove space; border(land)s. Resumo O presente ensaio enfoca as dinâmicas da diferença cultural e da diversidade e suas representações na ficção panamericana de Gisèle Pineau, Maryse Condé, Dionne Brand, T. C. Boyle, Conceição Evaristo e Alejo Carpentier. Ilha do Desterro Florianópolis nº 48 p.115-134 jan./jun. 2005 116 Roland Walter Ao longo do texto, são abordadas e problematizadas as seguintes questões: como é constituída, produzida e encenada a identidade quando formas de opressão com base na identidade negam ou delimitam a negociação e compreensão de seus significados? Como a diferença e a diversidade designam o outro? Como são constituídos, mantidos ou descontruídos os limites da diferença e as fronteiras da diversidade? E, finalmente, se esses limites ou fronteiras constituem o espaço das relações de poder onde as identificações são performatizadas, então, quais são seus efeitos sobre a formação da identidade? Palavras-chaves: identidade cultural; diferença cultural (como separação); diversidade cultural (como relação); transculturação; espaço mangrove (mangue); fronteiras. “We know how to be a thousand different people in turn, and we name the sum of these people ‘I.’” (Huston 2002, 88) “A la gente no le gusta vivir con gente distinta. ... Otras costumbres, otra manera de hablar la asustarán, como si el mundo fuera confuso, oscuro, de repente. La gente quisiera que todos fueran iguales ...” (Vargas Llosa 1993, 211). “En el encuentro de culturas del mundo, debe asistirnos el poder imaginario para concebir todas las culturas como factores que tienden, al mismo tiempo, a la unidad y a la diversidad libertadoras” (Glissant 2002, 71-72). “Construire dans une diversité qui s’ouvrait en souffrance sur tous les continents. ... Une manière d’existence dans les chants du Divers”(Chamoiseau 1997, 175; 208). In response to this issue’s theme, the aim of my reflections is to trace the relational dynamics of cultural difference and diversity as repre- sented in Pan-American fiction. In the process, they address the follow- ing questions: How is identity constituted, produced, and enacted in a world characterized by disjunctive flows of objects and persons—flows nourished by the contradictory complementarity of location, displace- ment and relocation, difference and diversity, broken origins, deferred homecomings and newly established homes—when identity-based forms of oppression deny or delimit the negotiation and comprehension The poetics and politics... 117 of identity’s meanings? How does difference designate the other? How are boundaries of difference constituted, maintained or deconstructed? Let me first outline my theoretical argument. According to James Clifford (1997, 1), we live in a “new world order of mobility, of rootless histories.” Movement between and within communities, nations, and continents is not a new occurrence. What is new in our times of neoliberal globalization is the rapid increase in both national and international population mobility: millions of people migrate or travel across the borders of their region, state, nation, or continent in search of work, well-being, or pleasure in ever-changing global markets. Furthermore, this human mobility goes with heightened flows of objects, ideas, ide- ologies, messages, images, and commodities characterized by com- plex conjunctive and disjunctive relations (Appadurai 1996, 33-36, 43, 46). This post-national state of the world marked by migration, exile, and diaspora—constructions of imagined communities beyond com- mon origins, local traditions, geographical and linguistic borders—cre- ates new forms of belonging, “fractally shaped cultural forms,” which undermine fixed, stable notions of the nation and the self-contained subject. Simultaneously, our world order is characterized by relatively stable social structures. While the role and organization of the nation and state institutions (and implicit notions of sovereignty and territory) have changed in the wake of late transcultural and transnational phe- nomena, global processes operate and materialize (at least partly) in and through national territories and institutional arrangements of the nation state (Sassen 2001; Harvey 2000). That is to say, late globaliza- tion is characterized by conjunctive and disjunctive relations between different global flows and by the conjuncture and disjuncture between these flows and more stable forms and practices, creating various types of friction in different local situations: of subsistence, justice, govern- ment, episteme, and identity, among others. Globalization as a new world order of conjunctive and disjunctive flows, then, produces a se- ries of local problems with global contexts, or, as Walter Mignolo (2000) theorized, “local histories” and “global designs” are intertwined in a 118 Roland Walter mutual relation of appropriation and reappropriation within a hierar- chical structure and process of domination and subordination. This confluence of “cultural entities” (Huntington 1993, 23), in which cul- tural differences are essentialized into firmly rooted, civilizationally and nationally specific identities, and transcultural spaces character- ized by overlaps, juxtapositions and mixtures of cultural fragments makes it necessary for us to reconsider the representation of cultural, identitarian relationality. Cultural identity is determined by the cosmology and cosmogony of a nation/tribe/ethnic group in a historical process. Thus, the subject position is “assigned” within a network of power relations imbued with ideology (Foucault 1972, 96). This assignation, however, fixes iden- tity only temporarily in a specific position. First, since the interplay of “residual” and “emergent” cultural elements, forces and practices (Williams 1997, 40-42) constitutes the dynamic nature of the subject’s order of knowledge. Second, since the subject constantly reinvents his/ her identity on the basis of complex subjective reasons connected with his/her social positioning (race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, class, work, etc.) and experience. Identity, then, is continuously recreated in a process of “being” and “becoming” (Hall 2000)—a process in which identity conditions and is conditioned by the subject. Furthermore, iden- tity is constituted out of difference in that its meaning depends on its relation to, its difference from, other identities. The one we talk about by saying ‘I’ is not the speaker herself/himself. The ‘I’s gaze/utter- ance as refracted in the eyes, imagination and speech act of others undermines the fixed (b)orders which separate them. In the process, these (b)orders are opened up to their adjoining heterotopic border- lands where the self intersects with others against and through which it is constituted. This means that the self is intimately connected with and yielding to its others and vice versa. Thus cultural identity can only be understood as one that stems from and is imbued with its multiple differences. Cultural difference, then, is not structured by binary oppo- sitions (the ‘one’ and the ‘other’; the ‘same’ and the ‘different’ etc.) but by heterogeneous relations: a migratory site of ever-changing conflict- The poetics and politics... 119 ing and complementary positions and positionings. Against certain multicultural discourses, which have imbued difference, the process of differentiation, with ideologies of division, separatism, exclusion, and otherization based on an authentic, stable identity, I understand differ- ence as a form of multiple differentiations/layers within, between, and across multiple entities. The relation between these
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