Kitabı oku: «border and bordering», sayfa 3

Against the sterile clichés of opinion (doxa), Matthew Arnold pitted culture for its fresh possibility of “fusing horizons''. Though commonly taken as an apologist for ‘high culture’ and Englishness as norms, Arnold found culture to be far from stabilizing and actually fissured with differences. Finding English culture ‘ambivalent’ and ‘antagonistic’ and Victorian ideologies barren, Arnold came to share actively the burgeoning interests in Gypsies in the 1850s and 1860s. Material realities of changing Victorian society had inspired in Arnold the creative process of ‘becoming different’ and ‘active individuation’ by wilful displacement to and fascination for peripheral locations. Arnold’s re-telling of Glanvil’s seventeenth-century story of a legendary scholar’s voluntary withdrawal from Oxford evinces how ‘nomadic multiplicities’ can offer a leeway to the tutelage of Victorian ideology and its closed and bounded horizon. In foregrounding mutation and creative transformation in the Gypsy life and its ‘wild brotherhood’, Arnold’s poem contravenes fixed ways of existing. Chapter 14 attempts to read how the contours of space and time are redrawn in Arnold’s poem; in charting the roving of a scholar in and around Oxford and its countryside where it extols the illegitimate presence of the ‘margin’ and its overhaul of culture’s homogenizing, nationalistic affiliation. With Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual apparatus of ‘line of flight’ and ‘striated space’, Nirjhar Sarkar tries to understand the process of overcoming or transcending spatio-temporal belonging, hindrance of fixed and identifiable points which are germane to conventional mode of existence. As individuals create lines of flight from segmented life for them to unstructure the received ideas and de-throne ‘intellectual’ glory, Arnoldian hero in The Scholar Gypsy may said to have entered a passional ‘molecular’ phase of life. By creating and transforming the world, his story continues to be a bold antidote against blinding doctrines of border.

As political consciousness was gaining force in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India, nationalistic concerns found its way into every aspect of social, cultural and materialistic existence. It is with the rise of such concerns that the segregation between public and private domains manifested itself in numerous ways to suit the nationalistic project. The effects of such compartmentalization was ubiquitous upon women who by now had become the most contested object of reform movements triggered by both the colonizing mission of ‘saving the brown woman from the brown man’ and the nationalistic mission of transcreating women as goddess/mother/nation. Within these contradictory pulls of the time, women found themselves trapped for a voice and a vocabulary which could give shape to their anxieties and misgivings while also allowing them to recognize the ways of moving out and identifying their subjectivities formed for themselves. It was the drive towards education of women which created the perforation in an otherwise claustrophobic existence within concentric borders of control. Education which was supposed to prepare women according to the nationalistic need, transformed them into subjects who now set out to remake, recast women into new roles. New, not adhunik, or modern as we know it now, but nabya was how change was understood then, which also would lead us to understand the indigenous parameters of modernity. It is this ‘new woman’ or nobeena, who constantly tries to move out from her constrictions, mainly using the tool of education. What then emerged was the ‘lekhika’, the phenomenon of the woman writer in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, who blurred the borders of private and public existence by writing about her private life for the public readers. While it would be too far-fetched to state that women writers were not implicit subjects of patriarchy, it is also true that it was through these writers that the patriarchal citadel of existence was rocked from within the very andarmahals of the bhadralok household. While concentrating on the very act of writing by women, Chapter 15 tries to understand how the idea of ‘new woman’ gained currency in the intellectual world of late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Bengal where the blurring of the private and public domains of existence for women became a consistent act of striking against the world, the bahir, while also trying to comprehend the meanings within the home, the ghar. In this respect, Priyanka Chatterjee refers to similar movements in England during the same time frame, the differences it posed against the indigenous counterpart and the impact the idea of ‘new woman’ had in the encounters of women regarding the public-private divide which led to complicated representations of the character of women detectives in fictions by women in both England and colonial Bengal.

Children’s texts or primers are not as innocent as they appear to be. They often carry the ideology of the hegemonic groups and ruling class. Tagore’s Sahaj Path is a children’s text, but we may unravel the text to pick up threads of challenging interpretations. In Sahaj Path, the presence of some characters who may be called subalterns is consciously highlighted by Tagore. They are accorded a place of honour and importance. These people, as portrayed by Tagore, are not merely treated as adjunct to the upper class people, used as soft targets to be wished away at will, instead they play vital roles in the society. Sahaj Path endorses Tagore’s notion of meaningful negotiation between the rich and the poor and thereby attempts to erase the psychological margins between the economically weak working class and the members of the wealthy upper class. In a way, the two parts of Sahaj Path re-vision the prevalent social structure and inculcate in young learners a vision of an ideal society that honours the dignity of labour and recognises the status of all classes, castes and genders.

In the last chapter, Goutam Buddha Sural shows how the lessons, to a certain extent, oppose subalternization of ‘marginal’ characters, thereby challenging a hegemonic reading of the text(s). The primer opposes the disproportionate influence of the wealthy on the working class people who enjoy a space of their own in social life. Most of the members of the upper class society as represented in these texts do not believe and participate in the marginalization of people belonging to the lower social order and this mutuality helps in the establishment of a ‘felt-community’ by invisibilizing the psychological borders between the rich and the poor.

References

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1993). Aporias: Dying—awaiting (one Another At) the “limits of Truth”. California: Stanford University Press.

Gaonkar, Dilip (2001). Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press.

McBrien, Justin (2016). Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene in Jason W. Moore’s (Ed.) Anthropocene or capitalocene?: Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. 116-137

Mignolo, Walter (2006). Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity. American Literary History, 18(2), 312-321

Mbembe, Achille (2017). Critique of Black Reason. (translated by Lauren Dubois). Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1968). The Will to Power (translated by Walter Kauffman, and R. J. Hollindale). New York: Vintage Books

Pratt, Mary (1991). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession, 33-40. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/25595469

Singh, Amritjit & Peter Schmidt. (2000). Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Soja, Edward (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Contemporary Fiction as a Cultural Map of Migration

Emma Musty

We live in a world in which everyone seems to be constantly on the move. Even as I sit to write this chapter I am doing so in an airport. I would currently say that I actually travel too much, as many others also do. I travel because I am a writer, because I am an activist, because I am an academic and because my family is spread throughout the four corners of the world. But the reason I can travel so easily is because I am British, because the forces of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism have made it so. Freedom of movement in this context has become a privilege, one often abused, and which has come from a history of abuse, and not the human right it is so often purported to be. As Mimi Sheller notes in Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes:

Freedom of mobility may be considered a universal human right, yet in practice it exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales. (Sheller 2018, p. 20)

I come from one of the countries that drew many of our maps and created many of the borders contained within them. My freedom of movement exists in relation to this history and affords me a privileged access to the world not enjoyed by all.

To understand contemporary literature as a cultural map of migration one must draw upon similar areas to that of mobility justice, those of “colonial, corporeal and planetary histories and interrelations” (Sheller 2018, p. 21). To this end I will argue that not only can a writer be described as a cartographer, but that a novel may thus be described as a map which exists in relation to the cultural and political history of both the writer and that which is written; the characters, landscapes and intervals exposed through the narrative. As examples I will use two recent literary works, Signs Preceding the end of the World, by Mexican author and political scientist Yuri Herrera and The Gurugu Pledge, by Equatoguinean author and activist Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, novels that reflect our atomised societies.

Maps created by contemporary fiction such as these are important interrogators of existing ideas of identity and culture in this time of globalization and migration. Driving the need for critical reflection on these cultural artefacts, which not only record the times we live in, but frame the questions we ask about our increasingly diverse and transient cultures. Reece Jones (2018, p. 162) in Violent Borders asks, “Are humans defined by our attachment to place or by movement?” It seems it is increasingly the latter. The literature of migration allows us to view maps and the borders etched upon them in a different light. It shows the human impact of border systems reflects our colonial past and elucidates our mobile present.

Though there has been much research into negative and harmful aspects of migratory discourse in recent years (Greussing and Boomgaarden 2017; Matar 2017; Volpicelli 2015), few possible alternatives to these dominant narratives have been brought to light. In the area of critical migration research it has been noted by Dr Kerry Moore that, “…migrants are rarely afforded a voice in the news…” (Moore 2015, p. 1), that although they are often cited as statistics, the discourse is depersonalised and emotionally removed. Contemporary fiction can, I will argue, fill this gap and by doing so re-humanise the migration debate, furthering the discourse surrounding mobility justice while highlighting the hybrid nature of our cross border cultures.

In The Rise of Trapped Populations, April T. Humble also raises concerns, highlighting the role of the border in creating new and informal spaces, prompting the need for further academic research into the impact of border security on migrant populations:

There are many hotspots where concentrated groups of people become trapped due to border security—such as in northern France, north-west Turkey, northern Bangladesh and North Korea—often congregating in informal ‘migrant camps’, with many similar scenarios worldwide. (Humble 2014, p. 56)

Both Social and Human sciences have long histories of viewing and negotiating borders. In the Foreword to Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, Pierre Sane asks us to “Imagine a world without borders...” (Pecoud and de Guchteneire (eds.) 2007, p. ix) while laying out a legal argument utilising current human rights legislation:

According to Article 13-2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’. But the right to leave is not complemented by the right to enter; one may emigrate, but not immigrate. From a human rights point of view, we are faced with an incomplete situation that sees many people being deprived of their right to emigrate by an absence of possibilities to immigrate. It is therefore worth envisaging a right to mobility: in a world of flows, mobility is a resource to which everyone should have access. (Pecoud and de Guchteneire (eds.) 2007, p. ix)

There is no room here to offer a comprehensive overview of the current debate in other disciplines, but I will touch upon several as we move forward.

Writer as Cartographer

“A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader)” (Turchi 2004, p. 166). In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, the writer and academic Peter Turchi argues that there are parallels between the practice of the writer and that of the cartographer. He sees this most clearly in the editing process. In both maps and works of fiction he suggests there are choices between what is left in and what is left out, as well as the point of view inhabited. He uses early American maps as an example: “Native American tribal areas were not included on early European maps of the Americas, giving early readers of those maps the impression no one lived there—at least no one of consequence” (Turchi 2004, p. 33).

Even as I wrote this chapter I had to create order out of disorder, I had to border the sections, I had to cut and rewrite. What would be the equivalent of this editorial decision in fiction? The voices represented, perhaps? Maps and writing assign blank space, just as the American map does, as a form of silence. In poetry this could include the physical layout of a poem but it also applies in fiction to what is shown and what is hidden; the dropped stitches which allow the reader room to draw their own conclusions. Turchi goes further to suggest that a piece of fiction can act in itself as a map: “We compel readers to look in the direction we want them to look, to see what we want them to see, in the way that we want them to see it” (Turchi 2004, p.82). When writing a novel a limited number of perspectives can be included. The writer directs the gaze of the reader just as the cartographer allows the viewer to see only what she has decided to include within the perimeters of the map. When Turchi states that, “The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth” (Turchi 2004, p. 73), he reveals the constructed nature of both.

Both books and maps are constructions which show us a carefully-crafted view of the world. This is not to say they are out to trick us necessarily, but that the magic they perform is to show us something that we would not have been able to see without them. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he drew the map of the island first while stuck inside his house on a rainy Scottish day. Before he knew it, he was writing a novel based upon his doodle, but when he sent it off to the publishers the original map was lost. He had to draw another, this time painstakingly recreating it from the novel, a far harder task. He felt that this new map never truly represented Treasure Island as the first one had. The original map had been unique and could never be remade in the same way that the original manuscript of a novel, if lost, would have been impossible to replicate (Turchi 2004, p. 227). Both maps and literature are thus constructed and are unique to their author and to their time of making.

In Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English, Damien Walford Davies suggests that works of literature can in themselves represent an atlas of complex cultural interrelations: “in the Anglophone literature of Wales, maps are a means of signalling and contesting cultural differences and emplacement” (Davies 2012, p. 15). In a bilingual country whose first language was subjugated by English and whose geography is squeezed between England and the Irish Sea, a preoccupation with maps is understandable. Maps, in whatever form—oral, written or drawn—allow us to place ourselves culturally as well as geographically. They allow us to consider where we belong and to whom. Katherine Harmon, who brought together a collection of artist maps and essays in You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination, suggests that “humans have an urge to map—and that this mapping instinct, like our opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us human” (Harmon 2004, p. 10).

Our need to locate ourselves, to map our territory, is far older than the property laws and national boundaries which mark the maps of the modern world. It could even be argued that maps have been, and remain, necessary for survival: “The earliest maps are thought to have been created to help people find their way and to reduce their fear of the unknown. We want to know the location of what we deem life-sustaining (hunting grounds and sources of freshwater, then; now, utility lines and grocery stores) and life-threatening (another people’s lands; the toxic runoff from a landfill)” (Turchi 2004, p. 11).

Maps offer us parameters in which to live in practical terms, as above, but potentially the idea of orientation also includes social or even spiritual connotations. As writer Stephen S. Hall suggests: “Orienting begins with geography, but it reflects the need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit into this landscape” (Harmon 2004, p. 15). Duncan Campbell, cited by Walford Davies, defines psychogeography as “a species of border-writing, standing uneasily between so many oppositions (mind and world, city and country, myth and history), never resolving in favour of one side or another, and above all, never forgetting” (Davies, p. 23). To say that one belongs here is implicitly saying one does not belong elsewhere.

Maps and the (In)visible

Maps shape our view of the world and mirror our cultures. They can chart us at the centre of the universe or make us disappear. It is this power that can make them dangerous.

Etymologically the map is a conception of the arrangement of something as much as it is a representation of the earth’s surface. The state’s cartographic violence thus helps it define who or what exists and in what order. Maps are thus a means of both physical colonization and conceptual control, involving both a cognitive paradigm as well as a practical means of political administration. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419)

Mark Neoclaus in Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography discusses the relationship between the map and the state arguing that the widespread use of cartography was concurrent with the birth of the nation state (circa 1600) and that since this point maps have been utilised as a state tool to legitimise and control state territory. Such a political understanding of cartographic practice is at odds with more traditional views. The International Cartographic Association has defined the map as “a symbolized image of geographic reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative efforts of cartographers and designed for use when spatial relationships are of special relevance.” (International Cartographic Society cited in Dorling and Fairbairn 1997, p. 3) Although this definition is broad and allows for the ‘creative’, the map is designated as an object containing ‘geographic reality’ and attributing the ability to create this reality to a specific profession: ‘cartographers’. Further to this, cartography is understood to utilise scientific methods which suggests scientific certainty or at least objectivity on the part of the creator (Godlewska 1999, p. 21). The subjective choices of the cartographer must then come at the point of selecting which ‘features or characteristics’ to represent. It is into this gap between the objective and subjective that Dennis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, steps, suggesting that “... all maps, inevitably, unavoidably, necessarily embody their authors’ prejudices, biases and partialities...” (Wood 1992, p. 24). Taking the map as a text which is contrived, conceived and edited it would necessarily contain the ‘prejudices, biases and partialities’ of the author not only through what is included, but also though what is omitted; an overtly political, and potentially violent, act.

Karen Piper, author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity, suggests that the editing process utilised by cartographers, the decision over what is shown and what is hidden, always has a political agenda:

The history of cartography has […] been a history of coding the enemy, making a “them” and “us” that can be defended with a clear border. It has been, above all, a history of pushing “them” out of territory that is considered ours—denying their existence, deleting their maps, drawing lines in the sand. (Piper 2002, p. x)

Such a schism between the political reality of a country and its representation, has led J. B. Hartley to question the ‘geographic reality’ proposed by the International Cartographic Society: “If a map asserts that the status quo is good, and the status quo is actually evil, then the map is to that extent incorrect...” (Hartley 2002, p. 21). To what extent it is the role of a map to address concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is questionable yet if maps can be conceived as providing us with “reality” (Wood 1992, p. 4), which Wood suggests goes beyond geography alone, then it seems unavoidable that they should contain some form of value judgement. Viewed in this moral context, a map of a country under fascist rule could, as Woods states, be described as ‘incorrect’ as the ‘status quo’ represented is generally considered unacceptable, and in the case of many countries in Europe during the Second World War was fatal for a large proportion of the population. A novel, on the other hand, has the ability to articulate the human experience of living within the geographical space in which the action takes place.

To be ‘Off the map’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is to be “Out of existence… an insignificant position; of no account; obsolete” (OED cited in Neoclaus 2003, p. 417). This is often the case for spaces inhabited by the marginalised and bordered, the migrant ‘jungles’ in France for example are invisible upon the map of France and thus exit both inside and outside of French territory in the political imagination.

This is perhaps best highlighted by Michael Shapiro, author of The New Violent Cartography, who points to the Pentagon’s new ‘map of danger’:

From the point of view of the US executive branch’s geography of enmity, not being an intimate in the global exchange of resources—for example being an Iran rather than a Saudi Arabia—increases your chances of becoming a ‘rogue state’ or part of the ‘axis of evil’ and thus a potential target. (Shapiro 2007, p. 304)

A point clearly reinforced by Trump’s 2017 travel ban on Muslim majority countries Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen as well as North Korea and Venezuela. Shapiro believes the maps necessarily create this ‘enmity’ between ‘vulnerable bodies’ and that this aspect of mapmaking, which he dates back to the Westphalia Treaty of 1648, has dangerous consequences in the modern world:

Ultimately, the biopolitical dimensions of USA’s anti-terrorism initiatives (the decisions about what lives to waste and what ones require exclusion or containment) are deployed on particular bodies, both those that are targets and those that are the ones that must confront those bodies in dangerous terrain. (Shapiro, 2007, p. 299)

When Shapiro discusses Tomas Munita’s photo of an American soldier in an abandoned building used as a look out post in Afghanistan he points to:

… a history of vulnerable bodies seeking temporary refuge and a place for safe observation in hostile landscapes that seem both benign, because they are temporarily devoid of hostile engagement, and threatening, because their encompassing scale appears to thwart human attempts to manage them securely. (Shapiro 2007, p. 293)

Here the vulnerable body is that of both the state actor (in this case an actor from a foreign state, protecting state interests far from the borders of the territory they seek to protect) and, if we consider the unseen other, their opposite, out of view because they are also vulnerable to attack. Mapping has sought to alleviate the fear of the state and thus its actors by creating a defined territory that can be easily defended against outsiders. The project of the nation state has relied upon this concept since its birth. As Neoclaus states: “the political importance of the map is obvious: it is one of the most explicit assertions of sovereignty” (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419). If an area such as the ‘jungle’ does not exist on the map then it does not exist in the state and can be easily defined as an area of ‘otherness’. The refusal to accept the existence of a portion of society, and thus their potential claim to state resources such as health care or financial support, is a fundamentally violent act against ‘vulnerable bodies’, in this case the body of the migrant. Yet this perceived vulnerability must also be called into question, as Yurimar Bonilla, cited by Sheller (2018, p. 104), “Vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and colonial condition.” and as Jones argues it is the border itself which creates the violence it seeks to prevent (Jones 2017, p. 91) and the state which creates an individual’s vulnerability to such violence.

The etymology of ‘territory’ itself gives pause for concern:

The notion of ‘territory’ is derived from a complex of terms: from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and territōrium, referring to a place from which people are warned off, but it also links to terrére, meaning to frighten. And the notion of region derives from the Latin regere (to rule) with its connotations of military power. Territory is a land occupied and maintained through terror; a region is space ruled through force. The secret to territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for the production of space and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 412)

This clearly links back to Shapiro’s argument: the state’s mapped territory must be defended, it is a place from which some people will be ‘warned off’. This definition suggests that the creation of a territory necessitates the maintenance of said territory through violent means and such violence is ultimately enacted on the bodies of both those who are perceived as threatening, but also those who are employed to protect the state. A juxtaposition which can only exist in relation to the border, leading Jones (2015, p. 5) to assert that: “The hardening of the border through new security practices is the source of the violence, not a response to it.”