Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)
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"Time in a Bottle": Temporal Discontinuities in Narratives of Diaspora / Emily Churilla
Abstract: The concepts of home have been, and continue to be, the foundation of much of the contention surrounding all sides of discourse regarding diaspora and immigration - through both viewing the home as threatened and defiled as well as redefining the imagined reality of home. It is the impasse of working around and against the frame of Western temporality and space from within the trope of home that this paper will explore; specifically how narratives of diasporic subjectivity disrupt and threaten normatized constructs of origin and time, history, and identity. Because to only consider the question of "home" leaves a considerable gap in the examination of narratives of immigration, exile, and diaspora - the gap (or lag) of time. Not only do different geographical spaces occupy different temporalities, but often groups of individuals within these bounded spaces do not align with, operate, and occupy time and space the way dominant cultures do within those same borders. This paper will examine temporality through diasporic narratives as both articulated by dominant culture fears of immigration and through immigrant experience. Concluding my arguments of the time gaps and lags of diaspora I will read Stephen Frears' 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things as a paradigmatic example of the ambiguities and potential perceived 'dangers' of the diasporic or immigrant body within the Western nation. The subversiveness in narrations of the diasporic subject springs from the paradox of colonial identity; the translation of master tropes and codes through the diasporic subject is an incomplete replication that does not allow the subject reconciliation within the dominant institution - instead creating a moment of crisis within the colonial culture.
Nationalism and racism become so closely identified that to speak of nation is to speak automatically in racially exclusive terms. Blackness and Englishness are constructed as incompatible, mutually exclusive identities. To speak of the British or English people is to speak of white people.
Paul Gilroy
Immigrants/ and faggots/ They make no sense to me
They come to our country - / And think they'll do as they please
Like start some mini-Iran/ Or spread some fuckin' disease.Guns N' Roses
<1> Contemporary Western/dominant culture rhetoric surrounding discourses of immigration and diasporic subjects often fall back into the well-worn paths of analogizing the body of the nation-state with the human body, resisting temporal permeabilities and slippery spatial boundaries [1]. Taking into account the fear of border-crossing as a fear of contamination and defilement discursive practices surrounding immigration often perpetuate the myth of threat to the nation-state through the notion of contamination that the corporeal bodies of these diasporic subjects come to embody [2]. Furthering this account is the contention that current discourses in the United States surrounding immigration and diasporic subjects are linked directly to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, but fall back on and solidify long-standing unrest, unease, and blatant contempt of these diasporic subjects and the notions of threat they bring as dangerous outsiders - individuals who will steal "our" jobs and live off "our" hard working tax dollars. To paraphrase George W. Bush in his September 20, 2001 Address to the Nation, you're either with America, or you're a terrorist [3]. But just what is it that makes these diasporic individuals so threatening to normatized notions of citizenship, subjectivity, and the state? Much has been written on the conditionality of "homelessness" of diasporic individuals, however it is my contention that only considering the question of "home" leaves a considerable gap in the examination of narratives of immigration, exile, and diaspora - the gap (or "lag" as we will explore in more detail below) of time [4]. Simply focusing on the spaces of diaspora - of home and unhomely - also overlooks an important aspect of the resistance directed at these migrating bodies and the power of anti-immigration discourse. This paper will examine the disjunct of temporality in diasporic narratives as these narratives are both articulated by dominant culture fears arguing the threat of immigration and through the experiences of diasporic subjects as lived encounters with a borderless world. Concluding my arguments of the time gaps and lags of diaspora, I will read Stephen Frears' 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things as a paradigmatic example of the ambiguities and potential perceived "dangers" of the diasporic or immigrant body within the Western nation. As diasporic bodies are marginal bodies, shifting and repositioning themselves both temporally and spatially across borders, it is this marginality that both places their bodies in danger while also creating them as threat to the nation-state.
<2> As Donald E. Pease points out in "The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement," the mythological theme of the Unites States as a "Virgin Land" - a land created through the double edged belief in the fable that America "had never before been subjected to foreign violation" (3) - is endowed with the moral rationale that this land "was inviolate because the American people were innocent" (3). Of course necessarily overlooking the fact that America was, in fact, populated before European settlement, and conveniently forgetting the genocide of the Native population that resulted from the European invasion; the imagined Virgin Land became a page to write out the seemingly limitlessness of American greatness [5]. The belief in the Virgin Land and its sudden transformation into the signifier of Ground Zero due to the devastation and tragedy of 9/11, however, became a turning point in the narration and discursive fiction of the United States [6]. Pease links this shift in terminology to the newly constructed notion of Homeland: "Bush endowed the state of emergency he erected at Ground Zero with the responsibility to defend the Homeland because foreign aggressors had violated Virgin Land" (7). No longer virginal, but penetrated by foreign aggressors, Homeland itself became not a definable physical space, but rather governmentality, and I might add, temporality [7]. Pease explains that the notion of Homeland:
engendered an imaginary scenario wherein the national people were encouraged to consider themselves dislocated from their country of origin by foreign aggressors so that they might experience their return from exile in the displaced form of the spectacular unsettling of homelands elsewhere. (8)
Perceived as dislocated from this imaginary homeland, the national population is subsequently victimizing the dominant population. Also, as Amy Kaplan illustrates, the notion of Homeland is constructed in direct opposition to concepts of foreign lands, immigration, exile, and diaspora, as she writes in "Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space":
the exceptionalist notion of America as the New World pits images of mobility against what might be seen as a distinctly Old World definition of homeland. A nation of immigrants, a melting pot, the western frontier , manifest destiny , a classless society - all involve metaphors of spatial mobility rather than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that homeland implies. (86 emphasis in original)
The redefining of America as Homeland, and the coalescing around the homogenizing identification with a unified (read: racially and ethnically pure) nation, therefore acts as an exclusionary policy for any alternative articulations of home identity, diaspora, and the unrootedness of immigrants and exiles - rendering diasporic subjects as "inexorably foreign" (Kaplan 87) [8].
<3> This symbolic move to Homeland also resonates with Britain's longstanding nomenclature, the "Mothercountry" or the "Motherland," a carefully constructed and propagandized identity that has long distinguished it from, and established a hierarchy to, its commonwealth holdings. The Mothercountry was an unactualizable ideal for her Commonwealth, an imaginary location where "anything the English did or the British did was always right" (Curling 12). The aligning of terms through the adoption of Homeland in United States mythology has both refigured and positioned the "native" or "national" of the United States (again, racially or ethnically pure) as dispossessed, ringing with the eerie echoes of Enoch Powell's (in)famous 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech delivered to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre [9]. Consider the following passage in which Powell speaks of the "ordinary, descent, sensible people":
for reasons which they could not comprehend ... they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.
For Powell, then, the Motherland has become a wet-nurse to so many of its commonwealth offspring that she can no longer suckle her "own" children. Linking directly back to (and anticipating) the American Homeland, the discourse remains much the same, including the collapsing of spatial and temporal signifiers: displaced from the physical places of hospital beds and schools they are unable to sustain a temporal position in Britain - a future. The infiltration/penetration of the defiling immigrant bodies becomes both a metaphor for sexual defilement and ultimately the proliferation of disease - not only are diasporic subjects perceived to multiply - to infect - the nation, but they are continually blamed for the literal spreading of illnesses [10]. The rhetoric of victimization of the "native" population that is being related, then, directly links to concerns of linear time and space, dislocation, futurity, and home. Becoming the immigrant, or rather becoming dispossessed (both temporally and spatially) like the immigrant, is precisely the fear of the self-identified national subject.
<4> These concepts of home have been and continue to be the foundation of much of the contention surrounding all sides of the conversation of diaspora and immigration - through both viewing the home as threatened and defiled as well as redefining the imagined reality of home. But in order to further discuss the slippages of time and those movements that subvert it, it is first important to establish the modern itself as a place of contestation and look at those forces that make it such a fertile ground for critique. For to disrupt narrations of modernity it is necessary to abandon organizational schemas that position the Other/non-West on the periphery of a European (and Northern American) geographical core and historiography that seemingly destines the non-West to perpetually commit the unsuccessful endeavor of mimicry. However, as Timothy Mitchell suggests, even to see modernity as a product of the interaction between the West and non-West creates the problem of assuming the existence "of the West and its exterior, long before the world's identities had been divided into this neat, European-centered dualism" (3). Mitchell reminds us that it is "important to remember that the orchestrating of image and imagination, the managing of the place of meaning in the social world and the experience of personhood...were already characteristic features of modernity" in the colonial world (17) [11]. Arguing that modernity is staged as representation has the effect of creating the projection we recognize as reality (through the organization of the world to represent these projections), and ultimately refutes the common perception of representation as postmodern (not modern). The significance of this staging or representation in modernity, then, is its openness to misrepresentation. Mitchell writes that within this (mis)representation:
an image or simulation functions by its subtle difference from what it claims to simulate or portray, even if the difference is no more that the time lag between repetitions. Every performance of the modern is the producing of this difference, and each such difference represents the possibility of some shift, displacement, or contamination. (23)
The subversiveness in narrations of the diasporic subject then springs from the paradox of colonial identity, and the translation of master tropes and codes through the (post)colonial subject is an incomplete replication that both performs and produces this difference - a performance that does not allow the subject reconciliation within the dominant institution but instead creates a moment of crisis within the Western national culture. Diasporic identity belongs to the future and the past equally, transcending time and place, history and culture, and becomes the "names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (Hall 394). Searching for identity within diaspora therefore develops a series of contradictions that moves beyond the dialectic of border-defining language and a conflation of the subject into the collective Other - critical in the narratives of migration and displacement is the ability to think beyond binaries of West/non-West. Narratives of diaspora, fictional and non-, lived and literary, map the gaps and factions of representation providing a counter-narrative to marginality and temporality.
<5> All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes." - Mark Doty. Recent work in both feminist and queer theory has sought to undermine linear models of temporality and space, showing how the queer/transsexual subject acts as a destabilizing force to conventional flows of power, modernity, and postmodernity [12]. As argued above, modern-day diasporic subjects often live on the rupture of modern temporality - coinciding with what Judith Halberstam "ambitious[ly]" coins "queer time" (1). For Western culture, timetables of the modern are staged and upheld through the strict scheduling of family and reproductive time: the biological clock, the schedule of daily life (represented by the 'early to bed early to rise' rule), and the time of inheritance as morals and valuables are passed generationally. Queer subcultures, according to Halberstam, produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to imagine futures "according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience - namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death" (2). While I am not suggesting that the majority of immigrants desire space outside the temporality of reproduction and the family, I do suggest that diaspora is a space where slippage - where décalage - can occur [13]. For one, the generational time of diaspora often falls outside the discourse of future generations in favor of a look back to past ones [14]. For the notion of generational time to fit into the schema of linear/progressive time we must consider the temporality of reproduction and the family as akin to a nationalist framing of the family - a framing that calls for the positioning of women as only for the mothering of children that will create male heirs to the nation [15]. And returning to the Mark Doty quote that headed this section, I consider the constantly diminishing future of queer time that creates a sense of urgency and expanding of the present to be parallel to the temporality of the diasporic subject [16]. The paradox of this expanding can be, however, also a sense of a diminishing past instead of future: one that collapses leaving the subject without a sense of home or origin.
<6> Working in counterpart with the fear of the perceived threatened or penetrated nation, immigrants - asylum seekers and other 'Third World' nationals - have been increasingly corralled under surveillance techniques and security measures that even further disrupt diasporic temporality. A model example of this watchdog system includes the "Eurodac" system that began operation in January 2003 throughout the European Union. Ostensibly put into operation in order to track and catch illegal immigration, the system holds fingerprints and personal data of asylum seekers for up to ten years, allowing authorities to monitor border crossing of asylum-seeking individuals and other illegal subjects [17]. Tightened border security and immigrant monitoring in light of the "War on Terror" has also led to an increase of impositions into private space (such as the Patriot Act in the United States and various new legislations from the Home Office in Britain) questioning the viability and existence of such concepts of the private [18]. This, of course, follows not just the heightened security after 9/11, but hinges on the recent debates regarding rights for illegal immigration in the U.S. Senate preceding the 2006 elections. The resounding effects of the continual "state of exception" of present day West articulates new (queered) spatial/temporal positions for diasporic subjects, buttressing their liminal position and portraying them as opposed to and subsequently threatening the nation. Adding to the sense of a "diminishing future" qua queer temporality, individuals of diaspora are increasingly placed within what I believe has become a "virtual detention camp" (following Nicholas Mirzoeff's Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture ). Mirzoeff explains that since the "fall of communism after the revolutions of 1989 power has reverted from discipline to detention as a means of correction, entailing a shift in its model institution from the prison to the camp for migrants and refugees" (119). Responding to the effects of globalization, Mirzoeff continues his argument:
Australia, Britain, and the United States changed their policies in imprisonment and asylum, abandoning goals of reform, rehabilitation, and refuge in favor of a strategy that can be called detain-and-deport. The camp for refugees and migrants has become the key institution of this strategy...the aim is to reassert the nation state as the key institution in enabling the free flow of capital while preventing the free movement of individuals that might threaten the continued viability of cheap labor markets. (119)
The queering of diasporic temporality - established as being outside of, and disruptive to, Western history, time, and consequently "the logic of capital accumulation" (Halberstam 7) - is shuffled into the virtual detention camp of immigrant tracking created specifically to prevent the threatening of capital, borders, and Homeland [19]. To be detained or held in detention is to be held between time and place; it is this internal stasis of the detention camp that also perpetuates the very subject position it attempts to exterminate.
<7> In the introduction to his History of Philosophy, Hegel explains that reason alone is the mechanism by which man can achieve his full potential and ultimately subjectivity [20]. However, this free subject can only be recognized within the communal organization of the state. Because freedom does not exist as original and natural without the structures of the state, Hegel posits that man continues in or reverts back to his primary animal existence - a space where he is not free. Michelle Wright explains that the "implications of this binary (state/nature) are clear: those who live outside the 'moral Whole' of the state are inferior to those who live within (and wholeheartedly support the state...the former lack consciousness and therefore those qualities that would make them subjects" (33). And while Mitchell's argument directly challenges the West/non-West division Hegel's modern state delineates, Hegel's notion of the modern state is, very clearly, foundational in Western discourses today. This becomes evident in the construction of the term "Western" as not simply those nations in the Western Hemisphere, but specifically as those who are " First World" - and is reinforced as the ideas of borders are reinforced.
<8> Using Hegel's notion of the state as that mechanism in which man can achieve reason and ultimately freedom, I would like to explore the concept of temporality and space in Stephen Frears' 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things as that which both recognizes and excludes the illegal immigrant from the body of the state, and through this exclusion, the Western/Hegelian consequently positions them outside ideology of freedom and rationality - pathologizing the immigrant and circuitously turning them into an imagined threat to the home/mother(land) as we have previously explored. Originally billed as an "erotic thriller", Dirty Pretty Things maps the lives of two individuals tenuously living in Britain. Okwe, from Nigeria, is illegal, and the Turkish Muslim woman he befriends, Senay, is granted asylum on the basis that she does not seek work within the country that provisionally accepts her. Frears, who in the past has directed such British films as My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid - films that also confront racial dynamics in Britain - presents a position on the practice of expelling the dirt of the body (as the dirt of the nation) as a way to maintain Westernized concepts of linear temporality and safely bounded nation-space.
<9> Because the immigrants of Dirty Pretty Things live outside the organizations of time and space established by the state (organizations that have been established, as Judith Halberstam writes, specifically "for the purpose of protecting the rich few from everyone else" (10)), these individuals do not share equally in the history and memory of the state. And because of the constant threat of deportation, the illegal immigrant of Dirty Pretty Things cannot share in the future of the nation as well. This exclusion and diminishing future, Halberstam writes, "creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment, and...squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand" (2). We see this most clearly in Okwe's refusal to sleep.
<10> Okwe's queer sense of time becomes most evident in his use of the herb khat in order to stay awake. Although both the seller of the herb at the marketplace and Senay ridicule and warn him against its use, his concern with the future is overridden by emphasizing an expanding of the present. And through its use, and Okwe's consequential perpetual state of consciousness, he exists outside of Britain's normatized sense of temporality: when Britain sleeps, Okwe remains awake. However, the film provides a warning against this kind of temporal subversion in depicting Okwe's mental fatigue and descent into a state of partial awareness partway through the plot. Through pathologizing his fatigue - making his subversive temporality a result of a possible addiction to khat - we as viewers (and readers) of the film are led into a quagmire of Western morals and are ultimately led to learn the lesson of what happens to those individuals who attempt to live outside of the constructs of linear and progressive time (that are often represented by the closeup camera shots of the hotel clock).
<11> The inequality in sharing time (as opposed to a complete lack) is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it acts to further exclude and marginalize the diasporic subject, and on the other it subtly breaks down the dominant discourse of Western modernity. It is this breakdown that is most threatening to the nation, as is the breakdown of the borders of the state itself, situated within the capillaries of flows of power. Joanna Zylinska, who revisits Judith Butler's work on 'which bodies matter', constitutes what Zylinska coins the "biopolitics of immigration." In this exploration, she posits:
the bio-politics of immigration is thus performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of human bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate members of the community is established. This process depends on a truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies some bodies as 'genuine' and others...as 'bogus'. (526)
Linking again to Hegel, the notion of the state is constituted through the Othering of these "bogus" bodies who are therefore crucial in the formation of the Western nation. The norms that are created to regulate the state require an apparatus (or apparatuses) to exclude the Other specifically from these norms in order to protect the integrity of the state and those who "rightfully" belong to it. In our modern world, these apparatuses include such methods of identification as passports and visas, the more technological based measures as fingerprinting and retinal scanners, and the governmental taskforces put together (i.e., Homeland Security in the United States, Home Office and Immigration in Britain, etc.) who draw upon such resources as wiretapping and other surveillance techniques. Apparatuses such as these listed above contribute to the preservation of the boundary of the state, constituting an outside of "those wanting to penetrate the healthy body politic" (Zylinska 526) and detailing precisely who is considered a threat to the nation. Here I find Judith Butler's reading of Kristeva helpful, as Butler states:
what constitutes through division the 'inner' and 'outer' worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes the outer...the mode by which Others become shit. For the inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct, the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability...but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears. (133-134)
This passage provides a vital framework for reading the end of the film. The division of the inner (the nation and its citizens) and the outer (the legal and illegal immigrants) is transgressed by the fact that these individuals have now infiltrated the body of the nation through the "excremental passages" of national boundary crossing. These individuals are, however, continually confined to the spaces of these passages in Dirty Pretty Things - in the closeup shots of Okwe trapped in traffic in his taxicab and of Senay dancing wildly in her surveilled apartment. The immigrants are only able to view the outsides of these passages as voyeurs, much as Okwe does when he watches the security cameras that monitor the hotel. And closely considering the enclosed and encapsulated spaces of the film - from the alleyways and the market, to the hotel, taxi, and morgue, each space quite literally is a place of passage. Even Senay's uncertain living conditions and the jobs that she and Okwe hold are all positioned in temporary spaces as temporary periods of time. Outside of the body of the state, sequestered in the passages of the body, the freedoms the state provides are ineffective - allowing the body of the immigrant to be penetrated through illicit organ removal and rape.
<12> While Dirty Pretty Things is ostensibly premised on the expose of the plight of the illegal immigrant, the "almost happy ending" that the film provides can be read in several ways. The first way, the "happy ending" way, focuses on the romance of the story. Okwe and Senay, watching each other walk away from potential fairytale ever-afters in the airport, are comforted through the knowledge that they share the timeless bond of love and sentimentality (as the saying goes, "it is better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all"), and look forward to a future outside of Britain - but a future that was quite possibly only made possible by the self-actualization achieved within Britain. And although Senay realizes at the end that New York is not all white horses and lights on the trees in Central Park, and Okwe knows that he can never reclaim his "real" identity going back Nigeria, they are both traveling to the places of their dreams. And, ironically enough, Okwe's return to Nigeria signals his return to generational time: the daughter he returns to represents the future (and "non-queer" time). The reverse reading of the romance is, of course, the meaning of this ending to the state, and what it means to rid the body of the alien objects that have lived in its passages. The queer sense of time and space of the immigrant body reinforces the marginalization of their bodies from the state thus excluding them from fully reaching reason and freedom. And ultimately, the state purifies itself as it expels its deviants - just as the human body expels its excrement. The consequences of reading ambiguities the end of the film delivers are significant, for individual readers are is left to draw on their own backgrounds and ethics in order to complete the message that Dirty Pretty Things provides. Each viewer/voyeur of the film is allowed the opportunity to attach their individual values of temporality and space to the film, thereby determining whether or not the ending is, in fact, happy. The marginalization, penetration of the body of the illegal immigrant, and consequent expulsion can be seen then as a horrendous commoditization and violation of the alien body, or as a sign that the system does in fact "work." Given that Hegel's notion of the state has been foundational in Western discourses and constructs of the modern state such as Britain, and that the Western (read: white, normative) subject is, through their navigation of the dominant and naturalized temporality and geography a reinforcing power in the Enlightenment struggle for "reason" and "freedom," the end of the film can actually serve to buttress the walls of the Western state.
<13> Lauren Berlant writes that the rhetoric of trauma within discourses of identity-groups has become so pervasive among modes of identity that pain has been turned into banality and "tired plot" (2). The effect of this exhaustion of the struggle over the conditions of citizenship and belonging becomes a
desired effect of conservative cultural politics, whose aim is to dilute the oppositional discourses of the historically stereotyped citizens [...] Against these groups are pitted the complaints not of stereotyped peoples burdened by national history but icons who have only recently lost the protections of their national identity [...] white and male and heterosexual people of all classes who are said to sense that they have lost the respect of their culture, and with it the freedom to feel unmarked. (Berlant 2)
The fetishization of the "average" citizen then becomes a mechanism that turns the focus of compassion away from the minority to the "legitimate" citizen. The "white and male and heterosexual" viewer of Dirty Pretty Things is allowed the choice then, at the end of the film, to view a "happy ending" for Britain and Western ideology in the cleansing of the national body from the alien, regain the protection of a homogenous national identity, and escape relatively "unmarked" from the intrusion (unlike the scar of the immigrant who has been butchered by the experience). The implications of immigration and diaspora are to become clear to the British subject, then - and while the film effectively shows the fragmented time and space of the diasporic subject, it allows the viewer to pathologize that subject, perceive it as a threat to the national body, and desire for its removal from the nation.
<14> Dipesh Chakrabarty's pivotal essay "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" calls for a rethinking of the master narrative of European history. Writing that through academic discourse only European history, through the universal category of capital, becomes knowable, "all past histories are now to be known (theoretically, that is) from the vantage point of this category, that is in terms of their differences from it" (Chakrabarty 266). The vantage point of capital demands from " Third World" nations a "transition narrative" that is doomed to fail through its themes of development, modernization, and capitalism. Reading history through its absence or lack, i.e., the failure of the modernization process, creates within the colonial subject a self-division that Chakrabarty writes is a result of the:
double movement of recognition by which it both knows its "present" as the site of discovery and yet moves away from this space in desiring a discipline that can only exit in an imagined but "historical" future, [a rehearsal]...of the transition narrative...Or to put it differently, this split is what is history; writing history is performing this split over and over again. (277)
As long as we continue to operate within the discourse of European history Chakrabarty continues that we will be confined to the "deep collusion between 'history' and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeoisie public and private, and the nation state" (285).
<15> Narratives of diaspora seek to redefine 'what is history' as they are concomitantly forced to locate subjectivity and community outside the privileged identity marker of citizenship and nationality - inventing heritage through memory and reopening wounds of the past. And these narratives rest on an ever-expanding future that denies the transitional narrative forever lodged between a medieval past and modern future. Chakrabarty writes that the project of 'provincializing' Europe, therefore, is a call to write:
histories that aim to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates [seeking] out relentlessly this connection between the violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home. (289).
While recognizing the impossibilities and ambivalences this last statement reaches out for, I believe that the position the diasporic subject occupies as 'always already' outside temporal and spatial discourses of nationality and citizenship, modernity, and history, creates a powerful anti-testimony to Westernized concepts of history and progress [21].
<16> The power of these narratives, then, lies in their ability to reject pathologizing myths of temporality and origin; recent scholarship has done much to challenge normative versions of nationhood and national identity. For example, José Muñoz writes in his work Disidentifications that, "the versions of identity politics that this book participates in imagines a reconstructed narrative of identity formation that located the enacting of self at precisely the point where the discourses of essentialism and constructivism short-circuit" (6). Disidentification becomes, then, "a point of departure, a process, a building [...] This building takes place in the future and in the present, which is to say that disidentificatory performance offers a utopian blueprint for a possible future while, at the same time, staging a new political formation in the present" (200 emphasis original). Similarly, Ann Cvetkovich writes in An Archive of Feelings that queer theory and trauma theory can constructively participate the illumination of diaspora and migration' geographic and historical dislocations and the "interdisciplinary project of producing revisionist and critical counter-histories" (119). What these and other individuals are attempting to do - often outside the traditional disciplinary realms of postcoloniality - is articulate subjectivity without the restrictive and essentializing discourse of national identity and citizenship. Depathologizing the complex narratives and histories that lie outside Western modernity allows us the ability to open up possibilities of new community formation based on the local, the fluid, and the transcontinental that go beyond empty studies of multiculturalism and globalization. And the various subject positions formed through alternate communities (women, religious groups, generational affiliation, and so on) have the power to resist the homogenous nation-based hegemony and sovereignty that fuels capitalist exploitation and expansion on a global scale.
Works Cited
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Butler, Judith. GenderTrouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?". A Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986-1995. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Curling, Arthur. Interview in "A Part of Britain". Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. Ed. Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips. London: HarperCollins, 1998.
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Frears, Stephen: Director. Dirty Pretty Things. Miramax Films, March 3, 2004 DVD release.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora". Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. (392-403).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. History of Philosophy. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1988.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Mitchell, Timothy. "The Stage of Modernity". Questions of Modernity. Ed. Timothy
Mitchell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. (1-34).
Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Zylinska, Joanna. "The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the Biopolitics of Immigration". Cultural Studies. 8n4, July 2004. (523-537).
Notes
[1] Often employing the analogizing of the body of the land or nation with the female body, a practice that was certainly deployed in colonialist rhetoric. [^]
[2] This paper explores diaspora (due to either legal or illegal immigration, for the chance of bettering one's situation or exile resulting from a threat to one's well-being in the 'home' country) as a concept that reaches out in time and space both horizontally (to other "diasporas") as well as vertically (both back into the past and forward into the future), and as a concept that is unifying only in its fragmentation and individuality. Diaspora, then, becomes a means of creating identity through its difference, in a way that is, as Stuart Hall writes, a matter of "becoming as well as being" (394), a move that creates alarm in the nation-state that articulates itself through well-defined borders and by considering itself as having a homogenous or unified past that resists a diverse future. [^]
[3] A transcript of this speech can be found online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. [^]
[4] Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism suggests that postcolonial intellectuals have responded to the questions and shortcomings posed by the Nationalist period by exploring the very question of home. Unable to locate a native land - and often an unadulterated native culture - these subjects have invoked what Gikandi believes to be two basic narrative and theoretical answers. The first response is to locate the postcolonial subject in what Salman Rushdie has coined "Imaginary Homelands", and appeal to the empowerment of the subject through the rejection of nationalist myths. However, Gikandi writes, to locate the postimperial subject in this Imaginary Homeland beyond given national time and space "comes against the weight of imperial history and its institutions, including the nation itself", forcing a focus on the "implicit conflict between the staging of a unique migrant subjectivity...and national myths of origins and foundations" (196). Another response to the problem of locating postimperial subjectivities becomes, as Gikandi argues quoting Spivak, "to argue for origin 'is to look for institutions, inscriptions, and then to surmise the mechanics by which such institutions and inscriptions can stage a particular style of performance'," turning the question into how can we deconstruct, "in the name of identity, the grounds on which this identity is constructed" (199). Ultimately, he contends, if we cannot move beyond the postcolonial aporia of origin and identity, we can attempt to push it to its limits. The significance of this push is to choose to transcend Europeanized notions of time and place, linear modernity and nationhood, leading us then not only to examine questions of home but questions of temporality. See: Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. [^]
[5] For an excellent discussion of the notion of the Virgin Land, please see Anne McClintock's 1995 work Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. [^]
[6] By "the signifier of Ground Zero," I mean to recognize that the specific location of the 9/11 attacks was metaphorically extended to include all of the United States, exemplified by such sentiments as "we're all New Yorkers" and the imagined community that sprung from the actual and affective relationship to the event itself. [^]
[7] Note the language of penetration into the Virgin Land feminizes the nation while subsequently defiling her, causing her to lose her moral innocence. [^]
[8] Of course, this is merely a name put to the practice of racial and ethnic exclusion that has been long celebrated in the United States, especially, I might argue, since the solidification of 'whiteness' in mid-twentieth century America. As longstanding ethnic groups on the perceived margins of whiteness, for example the Irish-Americans or the Italian-Americans were enveloped into being 'truly' white, the great myth of the melting pot was (once again) exposed as fallacy. [^]
[9] Speech taken from the transcript found online at http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol1no1/ep-rivers.html. [^]
[10] As for the literal spreading of illnesses, Anthony Browne argues in The Spectator that the massive immigration population has been importing fatal disease: "The thousands of infected immigrants who are arriving in Britain each year are doubling the rate of HIV, trebling the rate of TB, and increasing twenty-fold the rate of hepatitis B. All of these are life-threatening diseases which could be, and in some cases have been, passed on to the host community" (2003, p.12). And of the metaphor of the immigrant body infection the nation, I turn to Robert S. Leiken's statement in "Europe's Immigration Problem, and Ours" where he writes that the geopolitical stakes of Muslim populations in Europe (that relate directly to the problem of terrorism in the United States) is "nourished [...] by high immigrant fertility rates," translating into political power. Additionally, media coverage and debates on immigration in the United States regarding the growth of non-white citizens and subjects (including both legal and illegal immigrants) constantly poses the 'threat' that the white population will become the minority before too long; and the inclusion of Eastern Europe into the European Union has created a quite a sensation in the Summer 2006 news through continually tracking the numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe into Britain. [^]
[11] Rita Felski poses the question in her essay "Fin de siécle, Fin de sexe": "When and how did history die? [...] did it dissolve slowly and invisibly into a phantasmagoria of media images, into glossy simulations of a rapidly receding, ever more knowable past?" (336) [^]
[12] See such exceptional works as Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Rita Felski's "Fin de siécle, Fin de sexe: Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and the Death of History", and Judith Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. [^]
[13] Narrations of diasporic time operate not necessarily in opposition to "modern" time, but rather alongside it, in a way that echoes Brent Hayes Edward's articulation of the décalage. He writes: "Décalage is one of the many French words that resists translation into English... It can be translated as "gap," "discrepancy," "time lag," or "interval"; it is also the term that French speakers sometimes use to translate "jet lag". In other words, a décalage is either a difference or gap in time (advancing or delaying a schedule) or in space (shifting or displacing an object)" (65). Edwards' contention, then, is that narrations of diaspora must be approached through their décalage, as it is this gap that will allow the African diaspora movement in various articulations. Décalage works, much like the elbow or knee joint, as a place of both separation and linkage - and it is the combining-disjuncture of diasporic temporality that destabilizes Western modernity, allowing for such evolutions. See: Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Uses of Diaspora". Social Text. 19n1, 2001. (45-73). [^]
[14] Additionally, in Ranajit Guha's introduction to The Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986-1995, Guha writes of the slippages that can occur between the generations of the postcolonial family. And while he is not specifically referring to subjectivity in the diaspora, I believe that his comments apply as he writes that the generation "acts not only as a force for continuity but also as one that promotes diversity and change, since what it inherits is always less than the whole of its ancestral culture. Humanity [...] does not grow like the annual ring of a tree, and cultural transfer over time is necessarily incomplete" (x). For Mark Stein (in Black British Literature), the generation is "not only influenced by the preceding one, but also the political climate they are born into, and by the cultures they inherit from various sources" (6). [^]
[15] Michelle M. Wright writes that "in narrative form, then, the story of the nation is always and only the story of men, rendering the nation's birth, its origins, its present, and its future wholly in the hands of men" (138). [^]
[16] And, considering the Guns N' Roses quote that prefaced this paper, the aligning of the queer body with the immigrant is not unknown or unusual. The rhetoric of immigration as illness and penetration also seems to link directly to queerness, considering, and in part resulting from, the debate in the early 1980 on the origins of HIV/AIDS. [^]
[17] Information from http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l33081.htm. [^]
[18] Ongoing examples of these would be the recent passing of three new acts that (on March 30, 2006) came into law further controlling immigration, asylum, and nationality: the Terrorism Act 2006, an act making the "glorification" of terrorism a criminal offence; the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act further restricting entry into Britain for work or study, stricter enforcement of borders through increased data sharing between police, e-Borders, customs, and immigration; and the Identity Cards Act. For more information, see the Home Office website at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-acts. [^]
[19] Halberstam's reading of David Harvey's In the Condition of Postmodernity posits time as being "organized according to the logic of capital accumulation [... producing] emotional and even physical responses to different kinds of time: thus people feel guilty about leisure, frustrated by waiting, satisfied by punctuality, and so on. These emotional responses add to our sense of time as 'natural'" (7). Time becomes stabilized with capitalism. [^]
[20] While I believe Hegel was specifically limiting the term "man" to the strictest or biological sense of the concept, considering the discourse at the time surrounding hierarchies of humanity (i.e., the Great Chain of Being which positioned the white male at the top of the chain, followed by the white female, the Black or African male, and lastly the Black female) I would offer that this term could be opened up to discussions of "humanity" as a whole while still retaining its limiting and exclusionary qualities. [^]
[21] The position of 'always already' outside becomes, in turn, its place within the subversive (or potentially threatening) discourses of home(land). Through the alienation from the imagined home of their past and excluded from the potential home of their future, the diasporic individual becomes the margin that defines the center. [^]
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