Critical Spaces of Diaspora

A way to understand the ‘Other’ (cultures)

Key Argument• Negotiating human conditions is an emblematic

critical impetus of diaspora informed by multiple cultural possibilities, and practiced through the creation of multiple spaces that cross the realm of the ‘self’ to that of the ‘other’.

• It offers a locale to cross from the oppressed ‘self’ to an understanding of an oppressor ‘other’. Yet, diasporic negotiation is politically involved in the most responsible manner; it engages the contextual social realities in order to enable creative possibilities for overcoming the logic of the politics altogether.

Key Argument• I consider the connection between diaspora,

dislocation of identity and the creation of negotiating spaces that qualify an 'epistemology of Diaspora' against essentialised and ethnocentric construction of realities.

• It invites a kind of humanistic involvement that assures the ‘situatedness of the ethical’ in a framework of politics to overcome the political, and to transcend the historical moment, but not to enslave individuals to the imperatives, limits, and possibilities of the political.

‘Theoretical’ Perspectives

Three elements:

‘Diasporic Philosophy’ of Frankfort School, ‘Hybridity’ & ‘Third Space’ (Bhabha), and Bakhtian’s Dialogism.

‘Critical Spaces of Diaspora’ carves out a middle way between wholesale ‘Diasporic Philosophy’, ‘dialogism’ and culturally-specific ‘Hybridity’

Diaspora (Diasporic Philosophy)

Diasporic Philosophy (condition)- Diasporic thinking acts as a gate that unbinds the mind

from the monolith of the ‘self’ and that of the ‘other’,- It enables creative improvisations and births that make

Diaspora an impetus to new possibilities for happiness, meaning, aim, and togetherness.

- It refuses becoming victimised by the 'self-evidence', 'self-content', and the 'negation of the ‘other'.

- It refuses 'any identity thinking' in ontological, epistemological, ethical, existential, and political terms.

Diasporic Vision of Reality (DVR)• DVR is born since the birth of human baby.

Receiving a unique way of treatment, however, this potential is robbed, reworked, ideologised, and productivised by sophisticated cultural systems, therefore

• DVR acknowledges humans' homelessness as a 'gate to the elaboration of possibilities for diaspric vision of realities.

Hybridity and Third Space (Bhabha, 1994)• Hybridity is positioned as antidote to the belief in

invariable and fixed properties which define the whatness of a given entity

• The basic assumption of hybridity is that 'diversity' replaces 'authenticity'; “cultures are inevitably hybridised”

• Fixity and fetishism are dangerous tenets of identities • The creation of dynamic subject-positions as locales

that disrupt hegemonic narratives of cultural structures and practices

• Hybridity is a locus of ‘in-between spaces’, where the 'cutting edge of translation and negotiation' occurs

• Third Space of culture's hybridity is a position that brings 'cultural differences into a creative contact’

• Third space is "intrinsically critical of essential positions of identity and a conceptualisation of original or originary culture”

• Hybridity is not to trace two original moments from which the third space emerges, it is the Third Space, which enables other positions to emerge

Dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986)

The basic assumption of dialogics is that the meaning of an utterance is determined by its location within a dialogue; this implies radical implications:

• when a speaker produces an utterance at least two voices can be heard simultaneously

• the meaning of an utterance is not reducible to the intentions of the speaker or to the response of the addressee but emerges between these two

• the significance of a given utterance is determined by its past that is no more stable than the significance it may be given in the future

Thus:• dialogics steps beyond epistemology into the realm

of ontology, which "implies that meaning cannot be grounded upon any fixed or stable identities but is the product of difference ", (Wegerif, 2008),

• and hence comprises a "radical challenge to the monologic assumptions of modernism in general and of dialectic in particular" (p. 348)

• dialogue regarding cross-cultural narratives has the power to take individuals to a position of 'critical consciousness', which potentially reflects third space positioning where identities are 'always in flux, split between two or more worlds, cultures, and languages

• dialogics aim to "articulate the meaning of people's ideas, our own and those of others in hope of learning not just who these others are but who [we ourselves] may be, not just what others may mean but [we ourselves] may mean among

others" (Bakhtin, 1986)

An Epistemology of Diaspora (literary & cultural perspectives)

• In literary and cultural studies, diasporic epistemology has been established in the writing of famous cultural and literary theorists such as Bhabha: ‘Hybridity’ and ‘Thirds Space’ (1994, 1996); Hall (1996a) and Gilory (1997) Hybrid identities, among others.

• A common theme that those critics share is an exploration of the complex fabric of diaspora within the notions of Hybridity, culture-in-between, cultural difference and multiculturalism.

An Epistemology of Diaspora (literary & cultural perspectives)

• Diasporic writers (e.g. V. S. Naipual, K. S. Maniam, S. Nadan and S. Rushdie have touched the complexity of meanings in their diasporic texts. For example, in his ‘Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism’, Rushdie (1991) perceives meaning as “a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death” (p. 73).

An Epistemology of Diaspora (literary & cultural perspectives)

• Maniam (1987) perceives the intersection of diaspora and literature a powerful apparatus to discover the power of the text to decode the epistemology of diaspora. For him, fiction has been the exploration of the past, present, psychology, conflicts and ambitions (p. 218).

• Nadan (2000) perceives diaspora-writing as a venture not only to understand but also to survive: “it has become […] not only the enigma of survival, but a way into the world, a solid mandala. Writing, though fragile and vulnerable, is the only home possible” (p. 101).

Critical Spaces of Diaspora (Abu-Shomar, 2013)-- Reading in 21st Century eyes --

• Meanings, nowadays, are rhythmic in shape and dynamic in structure without rigid, closed, or static boundaries, and approaches to them have turned into regulated disorder and planned chaos keeping the stance of knowledge itself in flux, in motion, and repeating forward.

• Similarly, the ‘new times’ have projected dramatic changes in the social, cultural and political spheres, which have brought fragmentation and growing pluralism of societies, and emergence of new identities, which render normative and stable meanings and discourses problematic.

Critical Spaces of Diaspora (Abu-Shomar, 2013)• The terrain of theory endeavours the idea of

paradigm (e.g. traditional Marxism, Western Feminism, Multiculturalism and New Historicism, among others) as ‘web of beliefs’ or a particular way of seeing the world around us.

• In this sense, the conditions of promoting different epistemological alternatives require critics (researchers) to explore and search for other possibilities to challenge the stability of meanings and consider new ways of thinking that surpass ideology, dogma, 'conceptual framework' and the notion of literary paradigm itself.

Quotes

“Among a plethora of enigmatic epistemologies of our times is diaspora. It is a complex, constant, dynamic, and constitutive aspect of human life (more so in our time) since the inception of modernity, through colonisation till the recent phenomenon of globalisation” (Dalai, 2009.

Quotes

Adorno and Benjamin (as cited in Henri Lonitz, 2001) insist that ‘there is no cultural document that was not a manifestation of barbarism’ (14), and approaching ‘truth’ via ideology is problematic. For them, life-philosophy challenges all kinds of existential self-evidence and philosophical self-contentment that effectively destroys or exiles the transcending potential of human existence.

Quotes

“Diaspora are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not to press the hyphen too far for the fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia” (Vijay Mishra's (2005, p. 134).