Iain Chambers

Citizenship, Language, and Modernity

This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically. (IC)

Migrating modernities in the Mediterranean

The following discussion on the Mediterranean has been critically motivated by immediate considerations of locality and authority. Who speaks for whom, both in defining a history, a space, a language, a literature, and the subsequent articulation of a critical agenda? In our particular case, such pressing concerns arise from studying, teaching and promoting interdisciplinary and inter-cultural studies in contemporary Italy. This approach, widely known under the rubric of cultural and postcolonial studies, forcibly raises multiple issues of translation. It also challenges the almost exclusive attention on the Anglophone world in the Italian engagement with cultural analysis and postcolonial critique. Simultaneously, critical disturbance and problematics that are usually located elsewhere, in the elsewhere, are brought home to interrogate the local and institutional complacencies of Italian studies and their particular understandings of the cultural, the historical and the critical. An enterprise of this type also involves working over the decomposition, debris and ruins of many an existing discipline: from the stasis sought by inherited literary canons and histories of art to the rationalized pictures promoted by geopolitical framings of the area to be analysed. To promote a tear in the textures of knowledge means, then, to insist on the historical, cultural and political importance of discontinuity. Such a discontinuity evokes not so much the cancellation of previous understandings and their disciplinary protocols, but rather the development of an unfolding series of reconfigurations that come out of the past, hence potentially already exist, to dissect the present. At this point, the centrality of the sea to any idea of the Mediterranean comes to our assistance. The sea itself confronts meaning. Its winds, currents, flotsam, varying depths and multiple shorelines induce a provocative contrast with the seemingly stable homelands proposed by the inherited archive of cultural, historical and disciplinary identities. Opposed to the geometrical (and geopolitical) logic of barriers to overcome and differences to integrate, the sea both reflects and absorbs maps that suggest an altogether more fluid understanding. It permits the possibility of an open-ended comprehension of the continual composition of a multiple Mediterranean, where West and East, North and South, Europe, Asia and Africa are caught up in a historical and cultural net that stretches over centuries, even millennia.

Theory, thresholds and beyond

This essay seeks to open up the question of the location of a critical disposition, the worldly conditions of analysis, and the vulnerability of languages, exposed to unacknowledged geographies, voices and places. The principal line of argument is that the accumulative force of Rey Chows work forces us to consider how the rest of the world becomes a target for Euro-American theory. This propels us into the heart of darkness of a political, cultural and intellectual formation specific to the West. Focuses of analysis—whether literary, cinematic or social—turn out to present us with slippery and excessive definitions regarding their disciplinary location: they become the unsuspected sites of unauthorized and often unwelcomed questions. For Rey Chows ‘style’ of intellectual work reveals a positionality that persistently stymies the universal and ‘neutral’ pretensions of the abstract knowledge proposed by the humanities. It is this gap, between pretence and positionality, that Chow consistently explores. Our attention is drawn through the details of analysis towards a further, unsuspected and unfamiliar shore from where the finitude of thought, its limits, blindness and epistemological conceits, can be traced. Pushed to confront its location in Occidental privilege, the largely silenced world that the Western academy nominates here returns bearing uncomfortable, perhaps even unanswerable, questions. It is this profound and unacknowledged provincialism that constitutes what Chow calls a ‘persistent epistemic scandal’.

A Postcolonial Sea

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE100154.sgm 10.1080/ 9 2882042000251769 hird Text 0 00-0 00 (pri t)/00 -0000 (online) Or ginal Article 2 4 & Francis Ltd 8 5 00September 2 4 Let me commence from the landscape of writing that mirrors and echoes occidental design and desire and yet refuses to deliver up its secrets: Joseph Conrad’s undecipherable jungle, the unfathomable echo in E M Forster’s caves, the reticent mountains of Assia Djebar’s Algeria. These all reside in the postcolonial archive, in the stunted translations of alterity, and the uneven politics of memory. The persistent testimony of such intractable traces comes to mind in considering the shifting currents and cultures of the Mediterranean. There is here, too, an excess that remains as such, present but unrepresentable, that bleeds into the account, that occupies the gaps between words, the space between lines, as the invisible support of the page. Here, too, there is the registration of the silence that represents ‘the end of the humanistic trajectory’.1 This is not merely the silence of the void but rather an interrogative silence that draws me beyond the conclusion of my words. The insistent supplement of silence challenges the fixity of the past and the reification of its authority in a unilateral remembering and representation. I am invited to consider the limits of historiography not so much in temporal terms – what is seemingly cut off from the present and irremediably lost – but in the ontological instance of an institutional refusal to consider other ways of being in time. This is to unhook a particular language and its explanations from the chains of authority, allowing it to drift, navigating in the dark towards another shore from where the locality and provincialism of its previous home can be registered if never completely abandoned.