hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
POLITICS OF RETURN
Respondant: Lindon Barrett, Comparative Literature and African American Studies link to faculty profile
Moderator: Erin Trapp
"Black Pacific Love Calls: Diasporic Longing and Migrant Belonging"
Vince Schleitwiler, University of Washington
The extravagant longing for home engendered by diasporic conditions is notoriously double-edged, driving both the utopian visions of liberatory social movements and the archaic essentialisms that must be policed by gendered, sexualized, racialized violence. In the long and varied history of African American migrations, this longing for home has been inscribed on any number of spatio-temporal locations both historical and mythical, from Africa to Canada, from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic, from the urban North to the rural South, in a distant past or future, even in a sacred time beyond history—but always partly grounded and fervently pursued in the present. But if diaspora makes the securing of home impossible, perhaps it is this extravagant longing itself, apparent in the themes and tropes of love so persistent and deeply problematized in African American culture, that is indispensable to an appreciation of black worldliness and migrant belonging in what Brent Hayes Edwards has called “the practice of diaspora.”
This paper explores some meditations on love under conditions of migration in what George Lipsitz has playfully termed the Black Pacific. While 20th century African American political imaginaries were profoundly influenced by speculations about an Asian “champion of the darker races,” such as imperial Japan, they were also shaped by the ambivalent participation of African Americans in U.S. imperial projects in Asia and the Pacific—providing, for example, the immediate context for W.E.B. Du Bois’s initial formulation of the concept of the color line. And if the movements of African Americans across the Pacific did not result in large-scale settlements, the travels of soldiers, intellectuals, and colonial officials (most notably, a young Carter G. Woodson) may be productively related to the more famous Great Migrations of Southern laborers and the European sojourns of artists and political figures. Whether mired in the despair of separation or haunted by the restlessness of return, the cultural expressions of diasporic longing produced by these circuits of migration yearned towards the (re)production of “home” that was historically both promised and denied by the racial and national imperatives of sexual (re)union—yet which hangs still in the interval between the call of love and the (im)possible response of “community.”
By gathering together a diverse set of cultural artifacts—including letters from soldiers in the Philippine-American war published in the Negro press; Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet sequence, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” inspired by the letters of black soldiers in WWII; Her, a neglected New Negro Renaissance play by Eulalie Spence; and Robert Johnson’s 1936 recording of the blues classic, “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”—this paper takes up questions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction, and race, nationalism, and internatinalism, as they are explored and recast through expressions of love across the Black Pacific.
"Imagined Empires: India’s Films Confront the Challenges of Diaspora"
Faiza Hirji, Carleton University, Ottawa
India is no stranger to issues surrounding globalization or colonialism. Indeed, migration and displacement—whether imagined or actually experienced—have become such common features of Indian life in the twenty-first century that the term NRI (non-resident Indian) is a well-known component of the Indian lexicon. However, the country’s relationship to these realities of globalization is complex, as demonstrated by the various Bollywood films so eagerly consumed throughout the diaspora. Despite borrowing heavily from Hollywood themes and Indian mythology, Bollywood films often manage to arrive at a new type of discourse, aimed at the dilemmas of contemporary life inside and outside India. These films address the poignancy of leaving, or never having experienced life in, a homeland, and yet they also suggest a facility of return, even after an absence of many years. In Indian films, at least those of the Bollywood genre, one can go home again, and whenever possible, one certainly should. Until that idyllic moment arrives, one should nurture memories of traditions and cultural values, protecting them against loss and preserving them for transmission to the inevitable offspring. Since 2002, the government of India has been attempting to perpetuate its own version of such a mythology. Similar to other nation-states in the developing world, India has awakened to the realization that even a densely populated country cannot sustain itself if its most educated and professionally qualified citizens continue to depart in search of greater prosperity and more diverse opportunities, usually to be found in countries such as the United States, Canada and Britain. Accordingly, in 2002, India extended the possibility of dual citizenship for non-resident Indians, a move that finally opens the door to return or, for some, co-existence.
Nonetheless, as Amitava Kumar (2002) so poignantly notes in his essays on migration, there are more barriers to return than those raised by the nation-state itself. While the entry of immigrants into a host country may transform that land, it may also transform the new residents as well, and it may foster a reluctance to return to a homeland that can never be the same as that found in the imagination. Bollywood cinema may well be consumed for the reasons that some critics have suggested, such as its ability to remind the departed, or educate those who have never been to India, of Indian values, traditions, music, clothing, and culture. However, it may also participate in a mythical structure that the nation-state independently promotes and that many non-resident Indians choose to endorse, suggesting that there is such a thing as Indian culture and an Indian homeland, to which members of the diaspora certainly belong and which they should reclaim in some form. The research project discussed in this paper seeks, through focus groups and interviews with young Canadians of South Asian origin, to discover how successful the state of India is, and how successful Bollywood is, in challenging globalization flows by promoting an image of India as a place of inevitable return and a site of belonging and heritage.
"The Past is a Distant Colony"
Hong-An Truong, University of California, Irvine
This video project uses found footage of Viet Nam during its French Colonial period to explore questions around the politics of representation and the construction of identity and difference in relation to history, time, and memory. Playing with the idea that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience (but through the experience of images and the imaginary landscape of images), and also by the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present, this video appropriates archival moving images of French colonial Viet Nam as a way to consider postcolonial subjectivity and sentimentality. This work attempts to examine the complex dynamics of media and temporality; memory, lived time, and forgetting; and the uneasy division and tension between the “mythic” and the “real” past.