Iain Chambers

1. Iain Chambers • Migrancy, Culture, Identity

2. Iain Chambers • An Impossible Homecoming • On southern Californian highways, around Tijuana close to the Mexican border, are road signs usually associated with the encounter of nature and culture: symbols of leaping deer or prowling bears that warn us to look out for them crossing the road. (1) • This time the icon is diverse, it refers to cross-cultural traffic. (1) • The graphic indicates people on foot. (1)

3. Iain Chambers • Desperate to escape the destiny of poverty, they cut or crawl through the border wire and, dodging the speeding automobiles, scamper across the concrete in a dash to flee from the past and in-state themselves in the promise of the North. (1) • This desperate scene of hope, migration and attempted relocation is a fragment, invariably caught in a press photo, on the news, in a television documentary, in immigration statistics, that nevertheless illuminates much of the landscape we inhabit. (1)

4. Iain Chambers • When the ‘Third World’ is no longer maintained at a distance ‘out there’ begins to appear ‘in here’, when the encounter between diverse cultures, histories, religions and languages no longer occurs along the peripheries, in the ‘contact zones as Mary Louis Pratt calls them, but emerges at the centre of our daily lives, in the cities and cultures of the so-called ‘advanced’, or ‘First’, world, then we can perhaps begin to talk of a significant interruption in then preceding sense of our lives, cultures, languages and futures. (2)

5. Iain Chambers • Such journey acquires then form of a restless interrogation, undoing its very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way. (2) • If exile presumes an initial home and the eventual promise of a return, the questions met with en route consistently breach the boundaries of such an itinerary. (2) • The possibilities of continuing to identify with such premises weaken and fall away. (2)

6. Iain Chambers • This memory of primary loss, persistently inscribed in the uncertain becoming of the outward journey, has made of exile a suggestive symbol of our times. (2) • In the accelerating processes of globalisation we are also increasingly confronted with an extensive cultural and historical diversity that proves impermeable to the explanations we habitually employ. (3) • The belief in the transparency of truth and the power of origins to define the finality of our passage is dispersed by this perpetual movement of transmutation and transformation. (3)

7. Iain Chambers • This inevitability implies another sense of ‘home’, of being in the world. (4) • It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging. (4)

8. Iain Chambers • So, I finally come to experience the violence of alterity, of other worlds, languages and identities, and there finally discover my dwelling to be sustained across encounters, dialogues and clashes with another histories, other people. (4) • For the return of the ‘native’ not only signals the dramatic necessity ‘to abrogate the boundaries between Western and non-Western history’, but also returns to the centre the violence that initially marked the encounters out in the periphery that laid the foundations of my world. (4-5)

9. Iain Chambers • Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. (5) • It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. (5) • Migrant Landscapes • The historical testimonies interrogate and undermine any simple or uncomplicated sense of origins, traditions, and linear movement. (16-17)

10. Iain Chambers • Considering the violent dispersal of people, cultures and lives, we are inevitably confronted with mixed histories, cultural mingling, composite languages and creole arts that are also central to our history. (17) • This is to leave open a space, an indeterminacy…. In that opening, and beyond the abstract ideology of uniformity stamped with the seals of tradition, nation, race and religion, we are all destined to live in what the Chicano novelist Arturo Islas nominates as a ‘border condition’. (17)

11. Iain Chambers • To live ‘elsewhere’ means to continually find yourself involved in a conversation in which different identities are recognised, exchanged and mixed, but do not vanish. (18) • Here differences function not necessarily as barriers but rather as signals of complexity. (18) • Now that the old house of criticism, historiography and intellectual certitude is in ruins, we all find ourselves on the road. (18) • Faced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weakening in the grammar of ‘authenticity’, we move into a vaster landscape. (18)

12. Iain Chambers • Our sense of belonging, our language and the myths we carry in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of ‘authenticity’ capable of guaranteeing these sense of our lives. (19) • They now linger on as traces, voices, memories and murmurs that are mixed in with other histories, episodes, encounters. (19) • The Fiction of Identity • Language is not primarily a means of communication; it is, above all, a means of cultural construction in which our very selves and sense are constituted. (22)

13. Iain Chambers • There is the emergence at the centre of the previously peripheral and marginal. (23) • For the modern metropolitan figure is the migrant: she and he are the active formulators of metropolitan aesthetics and life styles, reinventing the languages and appropriating the streets of the master. (23) • This presence disturbs a previous order. (23) • As Gayatri Spivak puts it: ‘In postcoloniality, every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the post-colonial is citation, re-inscription, rerouting the historical. (23)

14. Iain Chambers • It is the dispersal attendant on migrancy that disrupts and interrogates the overarching themes of modernity: the nation and its literature, language and sense of identity; the metropolis; the sense of centre; the sense of psychic and cultural homogeneity. (23-24) • In the recognition of the other, of radical alterity, lies the acknowledgment that we are no longer at the centre of the world. (24) • Our sense of centre and being is displaced. (24)

15. Iain Chambers • Our previous sense of knowledge, language and identity, our peculiar inheritance, cannot be simply rubbed out of the story, cancelled. (24) • What we have inherited –as culture, as history, as language, as tradition, as a sense of identity- is not destroyed but taken apart, opened up to questioning, rewriting and re-routing. (24) • In this movement our sense of identity can never be resolved. (25)

16. Iain Chambers • I might self-consciously try to halt the journey and seek shelter in the conforming categories of being, let us say, white, British and male, and thereby cut off further conversation. (25) • But the movement in which we all are caught, the languages and histories into which we are thrown, and in which we appear, lies beyond such individual volition. (25) • The awareness of the complex and constructed nature of out identity offers a key that opens us up to other possibilities:

17. Iain Chambers • to recognise in our story other stories, to discover in the apparent completeness of the modern individual the incoherence, the estrangement, the gap opened up by the stranger, that subverts it and forces us to acknowledge the question: the stranger in ourselves. (25) • So identity is formed on the move. [As Stuart Hall points out], ‘Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture”’. (25)

18. Iain Chambers • Just as the narrative of the nation involves the construction of an ‘imaginary community’, a sense of belonging sustained as much by fantasy and the imagination as by any geographical of physical reality, so our sense of our selves is also a labour of the imagination, a fiction, a particular story that makes. (25) • We imagine ourselves to be whole, to be complete, to have a full identity and certainly not to be open or fragmented; we imagine ourselves to be the author, rather than the object, of the narratives that constitute our lives. (25)

19. Iain Chambers • It is this imaginary closure that permits us to act. (25) • This implies that there is no privilege representation of reality, no single tongue or language in which ‘truth’ can be confidentially asserted. (26) • This involves entering a state of hybridity in which no single narrative or authority –nation, race, the West- can claim to represent the truth or exhaust meaning. (27) • The migrant;s sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition. (27)

20. Iain Chambers • Rooted in the Uprooted • The falling away of self-identity between reason and reality, between knowledge and the subject, after Nietzsche, after Freud, after feminism, after the ingression of other worlds, forces us to consider a rapid succession of horizons that challenge the pretence to rational transparency in our languages and communication. (33) • To rethink your time and place within a culture, a language, an institution, a tradition, a set of histories, is to rethink the purpose, direction and limits of these very categories. (33)

21. Iain Chambers • The Broken World: Whose Centre, Whose Periphery? • In the real and imaginary journeys that constitute the modern maps of metropolitan cultures there emerge linguistic and musical islands that form chains of identity based on very different rhythms of time and being. (68) • This suggests the need to connect – without reducing to the same – the sweep through the contemporary critical world in the Occident, which, in condensed, and displaced and partial fashions seek to speak of an elsewhere, of other worlds, and whose co-presence and mixing disturb and decentre our previous sense of knowledge and being. (70)

22. Iain Chambers • Now decidedly marked by the historical and ethical impossibility of speaking for the ‘other’, these ambiguous funeral rites invariably return us to reconsidering the asymmetrical powers of representations, and our place within them, in the present day world. (70) • Disrupting Authenticity • To these preliminary observations is to be added the further question of not merely what today is a language, literature and history such as ‘English’, but, above all, who are the ‘English’ now that identities can no longer be grounded in the notorious referents of ‘earth and blood’. (71)

23. Iain Chambers • It invariably still strikes us as a paradox to consider an idea of ‘knowledge’ that is not in the end of occidental origin. (720 • In the idea of roots and cultural authenticity there lies a fundamental, even fundamentalist, form of identity that invariably entwines with nationalist myths in the creation of an ‘imagined community’. (73) • In rewriting the discourse of roots and tradition, the terms of a metropolitan myth are inverted but the same oppressive disposition of power, positioning, subjectivity, agency and attendant modes of hegemony are inadvertently reproduced. (73)

24. Iain Chambers • [Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor] curiously mirror the prejudice stereotypes of Europe. (73) • This deliberately adopted black ‘other’ reconfirms the position already prescribed for him and her and reinforces the binary opposition between a completely separate black reality and that of the white world, as though the history of the last four hundred years had not had a profound impact on all cultures and their composite sense of identities. (73)

25. Iain Chambers • Does there even exist the possibility of returning to a ‘authentic’ state, or are we not all somehow caught up in an interactive and never-to-be-completed networking where both subaltern formations and institutional powers are subjected to interruption, transgression, fragmentation and transformation? (74) • Post-colonialism is perhaps the sign on an increasing awareness that it is not feasible to subtract culture, a history, a language, an identity, from the wider, transforming currents of the increasingly metropolitan world. (74)

26. Iain Chambers • Cultural Passages and the Poetics of Place • This brings us to the further prospect of rethinking the binary logic that lies behind so much of the discussion of cultural imperialism and the centre-periphery figure it tends to employ. (76) • What we are witnessing in ‘English’ – as language, literature, history, identity – is part of a wider process of dislocation and decentring in which cities like London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles remain centres to the degree that they become multi-centres of different histories, cultures, memories, experiences. (76)

27. Iain Chambers • Hopefully it might intimate how we could fruitfully move beyond the abstract polarities and positioning organised around the centre-periphery distinction and divide. (79) • Beyond the schema of economic imposition and cultural monopoly we might begin to think in terms of contamination and hybridity in the circulation of cultures, mutations that lead to unexpected extensions and configurations: a multi-lateral, however unequal and asymmetrical, series of exchanges, in which, for example, there is no ‘authentic’, untouched, non-contaminated ‘Africa’. (81)

28. Iain Chambers • The notion of a pure, uncontaminated ‘other’, as individual and as culture, has been crucial to the anti-capitalist critique and condemnation of the cultural economy of the West in the modern world. (81) • Such a perspective invoked its own surreptitious form of racism in the identification by the privileged occidental observer of what should […] constitute the native’s genuine culture and authenticity. (81) • There is no longer an ‘original’ presence to ground them in a presumed ‘authenticity’, stable source or fixed ‘originary. Holistic, organic identity’. (85)

29. Iain Chambers • In the space of this ‘third culture, neither native nor white’, the cannon , the voice of authenticity, of the patriarch, of the Occident, is referred and decentred. (85) • In the ensuing dialogue of difference our sense of each other is displaced, both of us emerge modified. (86) • This is to open up a movement beyond ethnocentricity: to open up the possibility of a ‘representational practice that is premised on the mutual imbrication of “us” and “them”. (86)

30. Iain Chambers • We move from the politics of margins to the politics of difference: a movement that overthrows the previous power/knowledge axis that once positioned and presumed to fully explain the margins, the periphery, the ‘others’. (86)