Carolyn M. Jones Medine

Culture, Location, and the Problem of Transitive Identity

“Identity politics” misunderstands the nature and, therefore, the importance of its subject matter. Far from being something fixed and exclusive, identity is the transitive or motive element that negotiates meaning between settled understandings and the fluidity of cultural development. A self, in this mode, is a being who can articulate a sense of identity—in other words, one who can narrate self-consciousness—within a set of ideas, moral and ethical, that locate that self in the larger human endeavor of community or culture. Making clear-cut definitions of identity is complicated by the experience of diaspora. Diaspora, initially, is an identity detour, a movement or shift away from the traditional understanding of the linear journey of the self from beginning to end of life within established structures, which allows us to make meaning along the way. Diaspora takes us out of those structures, creating dead ends that stop movement and establish new borders, new spaces of contact and interactions that lead either to reinforcement, maintenance of the “old” self, or the mixing, creolization, or hybridity, a remaking/remixing of identity and self in the new place in relation to new “others.” This remixing is further complicated by factors of race and ethnicity. In this chapter, we will look at manifestations of this remixing and the complications that arise in the context of diaspora, particularly confronting issues of race, identity, and culture, using, primarily, the work of Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture and Caryl Phillips’s travelogue/memoir The Atlantic Sound.1

Conclusions from a Transitive Space

We began our work saying that we discovered, in the course of our own conversations, that one of our interlocutors was Emmanuel Levinas. This discovery points to our method as scholars, as transitive and hybrid thinkers. Levinas desires to find a way to have transitivity without violence. Like Levinas, we too seek a nonviolent way. Yet that path is difficult. Levinas is clear that discourses—with their totalizing tendencies—cannot perform the act of yielding to the Face of the Other, cannot accept that freedom lies in the very act of limiting the self. The announcement of the Other, “It’s me,”1 undoes all theoretical language. For us, this undoing must await recognition of another undoing. If my sense of self is fixed and stable—most of us find comfort in assuming it is—the Other’s announcement undoes that fixity and stability. Properly understood, the Other throws us back on ourselves. This encounter reveals the transitivity of our self-understandings and the hybridity of the world we move around in. To say the least, the recognition is jarring. The key to moving forward is whether we react like Sophocles’ Creon or respond like Dr. King. In the former instance, we are controlled by the circumstance, reacting with the desire to control it ourselves. In the latter, we embrace and recognize the possibilities and limitations of our agency, seeing ourselves in our Other. In reaction lies violence and non-understanding; in considered response lies the possibility of peace.

Introduction: Negotiations in Transitive Spaces

The co-authored chapters in this volume are the result of over a decade of ongoing conversation. While our training is in the distinct disciplines of religious studies and political theory, our concerns overlap in several places including, but not restricted to, cultural criticism; the role, function, and power of discourse; the “other,” in all the forms that it can take, particularly in literature and literary criticism; and, more generally, “meaning” in all human activity. These diverse mutual interests coalesce around a shared concern with narratives of otherness and dislocation. In this book, we read these narratives not merely as critiques of existing structures, but, more significantly, for what they bring forward from the traditions in which they are embedded and how they challenge those traditions, both political and religious. We also read these narratives for what they tell us about either overcoming those structures or creating meaning within them, for while we cannot live outside meta-narratives, our interdisciplinary approach seeks new spaces in which answers to questions of meaning are made possible. This relation between “tradition and the individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot would put it, or between tradition and the “other(s),” as we would put it, is the site where culture develops.1

The Politics of Statelessness: Edward Said and the Ambiguities of Liberal Nationalism

Statelessness is a political form of transitivity, one that usually involves violence and displacement. The state is a different structure from community or the polis that we have explored previously. The state, as Arjun Appadurai shows us in Fear of Small Numbers: A Geography of Anger, is an overarching or meta-system.2 It involves order, norms, protocols, legislation, territory, and symbols (like flags). Appadurai writes that the state sees itself as complete. He calls this system “vertebrate” to contrast it with the “cellular” systems of, for example, terrorist groups.3 The “fantasy” of the nation-state is its trust in its systemic wholeness: it trusts that it is sovereign and complete.4

The Power of Horror: Variations and Re-framings of The Bacchae

Postmodernism has argued against a fixed sense of identity and has therefore questioned notions of essence. To essentialize is to reduce, to type, and to confine. For those who are among the colonized, however, ideas of identity and essence are not so simply resolved. Cherokee writer and activist Marilou Awiakata, in Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, argues that essence does not mean static, reduced, completely defined, and finished.1 Instead, essence indicates a stable point, a balancing point from which to take off, a taproot from which to draw nourishment, and a spirit that creates. “You adapt your form,” Awiakata writes, but “never, never your essence. Your spirit sustains the balance.”2 The sense that there is “someone there” who is and is inviolable sustains those who have been defined as “other.” If essence is esse—to be, soul, identity, deep self—what do we lose by saying it is not?

The Transitive “In-Between”: Culture, Meaning, and the Political in Voegelin and Bhabha

Political questions force us to explore the directionality of the transitive space. Here, we will examine the work of two thinkers: Eric Voegelin, a political philosopher, and Homi K. Bhabha, a political sociologist. Voegelin argues that the transitive—the “in-between,” as he calls it—is most efficacious as a vertical space: one that seeks truth while remaining anchored in the “ground of being” that undergirds all reality. He turns towards theology—namely, that of Paul Tillich1— as does Giorgio Agamben in his own way, in the current generation of thinkers. Despite Voegelin’s insistence to the contrary, the “transcendence” of this ground of being does suggest marked territory, a territory anchored in symbols. Bhabha, in contrast, argues that the transitive is most effectively understood as a horizontal space. He turns to the anthropological model of Michel De Certeau and the “practice of everyday life.”2 The “practice” of everyday life is a way to redefine political language, as well as other binding structures, through the creativity of the active human being. In a sense, we argue, Voegelin and Bhabha cross, and at that crossroads, we locate transitivity, which, for us, involves the contact zone, the space in which the colonial overcomes the “other.” But it also suggests more: the reality that, in that space, as Ashis Nandy showed us, symbols are both in tension and merging into new forms.3 Could we but harness this power, our reading of Voegelin and Bhabha suggests, we would have a fertile ground, though not one without tensions, for rethinking identity, community, and political form in the (post) modern world.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” Sophocles’ Antigone and the Crisis of Union

In the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln makes a deceptively curious statement, one that draws a critical distinction. “These slaves,” he says, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”1 Lincoln’s reference is to slaves (persons) and not slavery (an institution). He had emphasized the institution in the First Inaugural, and this later statement that these persons, not the institution, are the cause of the war suggests the centrality of black persons to his thought on America and the Union by the time of the Second Inaugural. Indeed, black people marched in Lincoln’s second inaugural parade, constituting a significant and, no doubt, unsettling presence. After all, as signifiers these people marked all the contradictions of America: slave/free; human/property; black/white; wealth/poverty. Lincoln’s assertion, however, recognizes these black persons as something more than signifiers, however. They are the bodies of living breathing human beings, though yet to be recognized as such; they are the challenge to be met if a deeply flawed community is to move forward together and heal the wounds of civil war.

Self-Cultivation and the Practices of Peace: Foucault on the Stoics and Peacemaking in the Modern World

In The Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault turns to the Roman Stoics and their influence, acknowledged and unacknowledged, on the modern world. His focus is on the emergent notion of the “‘private’ aspects of existence” and how they relate to the public: domestic, political, and social frameworks.1 Foucault’s work here continues the postmodern interest in the classical world and its notions of virtue, but also, as he says in “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” the interest in where Christian technologies of the self came from and how they have been distorted.2 In The Care of the Self, Foucault, as always, is interested in both power and pleasure. He asks how “taking care of oneself,” that is, self-cultivation, relates to the larger issues of domestic and political life, specifically issues of control of sexuality and power politics.

Going Home in the Work of Charles H. Long and Ashis Nandy

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that, in looking at our overlapping histories, we need an alternative to the politics of blame and to the “even more destructive politics of confrontation.” He writes: A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciation of the past, the expressions of regret for its having ended, or—even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive—the hostility between Western and non-Western cultures that leads to crisis. This world is too small and interdependent to let these passively happen.1 Like Said, Ashis Nandy, an Indian politician and psychologist, and Charles H. Long, an African American historian of religions, seek a response to the postcolonial dilemma, one that avoids anger, denunciation, nostalgia, and passivity. Nandy in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism and Long in the essays in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion examine how the cultures of oppressor and oppressed intersect, often unconsciously cooperate, and repel each other.2 Mary Louise Pratt calls such a space “the contact zone.”3 How does one construct new notions of freedom in a creolized space?

The Limits of Reconstruction: Reconstituting Community in Martin Luther King, Jr.

Effective and durable social and political reform requires recognizing and maintaining a tension between what we will call reconstruction (efforts to restructure the formal legal arrangements of the community) and more subtle and profound efforts at reconstitution (allowing the fabric of the community to be reshaped by the addition of the persons and mores of formerly disenfranchised populations into the community).2 In the United States, particularly in matters of race relations, reconstruction has been the paradigmatic language and mode of social reform. Our cultural reliance on the “rule of law” means that social and political reform begins and often ends with attempts to change formal legal structures in an effort to reshape the structural environment in which we live. What this formal legal effort cannot do, however, is reconstitute the community. Law can only articulate limits and suggest direction for the constitution of the community; it cannot teach people how to live together. Legal and formal attempts at reconstruction, as painful and important as they are and have been, are simply inadequate when the much more difficult task of reconstituting the community is neglected or, as is more often the case, assumed to follow on the heels of legal reconstruction.3