Dis/Placed: Virtual Diasporas

Dis/Placed: Virtual Diasporas Jennifer Leetsch Abstract In this paper, I aim to shed light on the different processes of voicing and visually producing a Black British diaspora. Strolling, a YouTube series created by Cecile Emeke, combines documentary film approaches with the format of personal interviews and as an online series is positioned in a fruitful gap between academia, art and activism. The series features speakers from all over the world and the viewers accompany them on their walks through different cities, such as London or Kingston. The conversations held in the videos range from gender, race, and sexuality to capitalism, media and cultural criticism and always entangle the personal with the political. Strolling negotiates displacement and placement in a two-fold way: firstly, by inhabiting the visual and digital virtual archive of YouTube and secondly, by deconstructing the space of the city, the metropolis London. The material space of the city sets the stage for Strolling’s dialogues but at the same time is transformed into a creative and artistic urban counter-space. The walker and the viewer are creators of a diasporic multi-sited elsewhere and everywhere. As a cultural and visual strategy to reverse oppressive dynamics, Strolling shows its diasporic male and female subjects as speaking against exclusionary and marginalising tendencies at work in British society. Key Words: Diaspora, migration, visual culture, YouTube, strolling, spatiality, London, Black British, Cecile Emeke. ***** 1. Introduction This paper discusses the YouTube web series Strolling. Strolling was and is still being created by Cecile Emeke, a British film maker of Jamaican origins residing in London. It combines documentary film approaches with the format of personal interviews or personal portraits and as an online series on YouTube is positioned in a fruitful gap between academia, art and activism. It accompanies different speakers on their strolls through various European cities and countries. The conversations held in the videos range from gender, race, and sexuality to capitalism, neo-colonialism and cultural criticism and always entangle the personal with the political. Strolling originally started off in London but since its first video in 2014 has moved across the globe in order to encompass the many different shades of the African diaspora. This outreach is something that Emeke has articulated right from the beginning:

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__________________________________________________________________ My intention is for Strolling to go global. I want to go everywhere from France to China and give black people globally a voice and a space to exist honestly and tell their own stories. I want to dispel the myth that black people only exist in America, the Caribbean and Africa. It’s unacceptable to me that in 2014 when I travel people still gasp “What!? There are black people in England!?” We are everywhere and we always have been everywhere, from England to Russia. We exist.1 Up to this point, Cecile Emeke has strolled in the UK, in the United States, in Jamaica, she has produced Flâner in France, Wandelen in the Netherlands, and Passeggiando in Italy. As Alexis Okeowo argues in The New Yorker, ‘much of the appeal of Strolling lies in the still-uncharted concept of black people on screen talking about their place in the world.’2 As can be seen in the short films’ treatment of their subjects, Emeke’s camera ‘lingers on their faces, the ways they move, their tics and flairs in clothing and accessories.’3 Because of her intimate attention to detail, blackness takes centre stage, seeking new ways to address questions of the gaze and of spectator-ship. Viewers, according to the show’s online feedback such as in YouTube comments, find the series enlightening, comforting, and even empowering. In documenting the global black diaspora, from children of African immigrants in Paris and Rome, to black Americans in New York, to young inhabitants of Kingston, Strolling creates a space, it re-tells stories of victim-hood and negotiates issues of immigration, race, gender, nationality, class, and, ultimately, belonging. 2. Dis/Placement Online: Media and Migration In the following discussion I want to interrogate Strolling with regards to two components of its diasporic dis/placement: the visual archive of YouTube on the one hand and the urban space of the city on the other hand. It is interesting to think of YouTube as an archive because it is such a public sphere, its platform the largest and most frequently visited video-sharing service worldwide. To read this mainstream cultural phenomenon as an online archive, interrupts the notion of archives as inaccessible or impenetrable containers. When I speak of archive, I mean both a collection of things, a repository of artefacts and other kinds of cultural objects – but also the archive in a more ideological sense. According to Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge, the archive is a collection of all material traces left behind by a particular historical period and culture, and is as such, socially produced knowledge. Or, as Jacques Derrida argues in Archive Fever:

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__________________________________________________________________ [T]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.4 The archive can become a tool for governing and policing, but also for fashioning accessibility and participation. To regard YouTube as an open and participatory archive, offers a fruitful way to talk about the dissemination of visual culture as undertaken by Strolling. As a prime example of new media, Strolling on YouTube can be seen as a visual contact zone which creates particular conditions of perception and reception – highlighting the production of subculture and inhabiting the role of both creator and audience, producer and consumer, encoder and decoder. It addresses the question of how diaspora can be seen: namely from multiple view points instead of a one-point perspective. This multiplicity is of course also mirrored in Strolling’s structure as a mini-series, with ever changing interview partners and ever changing locales. One of the first scholars to highlight this particular interconnection between globalisation, migrancy and visual culture was Arjun Appadurai. In Modernity at Large he offers ‘a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination.’5 And Strolling focuses on exactly this potential of the work of imagination and self-imagination, speaking back to strategies of colonial representation which mute the voices of those (formerly) colonised. Linking to these concepts of travel, migration and movement is also the subtitle of the project: Connecting the scattered stories of the African Diaspora – The term scattered evokes the etymology of the term diaspora, from the Greek dia [‘through’] and spora [‘to scatter or to sow’], standing for the notion of being absent from a (desired) location, of being scattered and lost, but also of something more fruitful, inherent in the second denotation of ‘sowing’, of planting seeds which can thrive and grow in prolific ways. Strolling, then, connects different stories and produces multifaceted narratives to speak back to dominant master narratives of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Strolling takes part in the production of a particular kind of cultural knowledge and heritage, forming an alternative archive, an online community, a cyber neighbourhood so to speak. As Appadurai has argued, communities no longer depend on physical proximity.6 The arrival of globalization and the constant and unpredictable circulation of humans, ideas, technologies, and images means identities have become transnational, with people relating to groups with little or no fixed location. However, and contrary to this definition, Strolling is also attached to a certain place. This place of enunciation is constituted by the very physical and real-life hometowns of Strolling’s subjects, which brings me to my second point of discussion.

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3. Dis/Placement Offline: Strolling through the City Besides the physicality of cyber space and the virtual geography of YouTube, Strolling inhabits a second space: This second space is the space of the city. I read the city, in particular the metropolis London in the UK videos, as a specific diasporic, postcolonial setting. Colonial and postcolonial discourses have always been infused with spatial practices. In Imagining London John Bell explicates the fundamental mechanism laying at the heart of empire: The ideologies of empire demanded that the colonized people be put and kept in their place -- sometimes a jail, but more often a figurative place on the lower rungs of a hierarchical racial order that positioned white Europeans above them.7 Of course, if one goes beyond the simple hierarchy of coloniser/colonised or self/other, it becomes clear that imperialism and colonialism was anything but ‘staying put’. Imperial culture was a culture of travel and forced movement. The act of moving about, of crossing borders, nations, oceans, was the deep structure of imperialism and European expansionist endeavours. And London was both point of departure and point of return, exemplified perhaps by the numerous colonial exhibitions held in the Empire’s capital – imperial object lessons in England’s power and grandeur, as it were. When Strolling then accompanies its subjects through the streets of London, that, in my opinion, can be read as a statement about the politics of diasporic space. To stroll means to walk around in a leisurely way, with no particular goal in mind. This practice of strolling as employed by Emeke in her short films brings to mind another walker, namely Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s flâneur (incidentally, the French version of Strolling is called Flâner): The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.8 While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a gentleman stroller of city streets, Benjamin saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. This idea of participation for one links back

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__________________________________________________________________ to the notion of Youtube as an open archive, and secondly to the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau, which I find particularly fruitful with regards to Strolling. De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and particularly the chapter ‘Walking in the City’, examines the spatial logistics of cultural consumption and everyday life. It investigates the use of metropolitan space as a paradigmatic example of how we actively re-appropriate our surrounding spaces. Certeau calls walking ‘a pedestrian speech act.’9 For him, everyday practices such as walking or strolling are enunciative. The physical act of walking realises the possibilities of space organised by the spatial order (the network of streets for example), in the same way that the act of speaking realises a language, its subject, and writes a text. Tactics such as walking in the city offer ways to speak back to oppressive and regressive structures, they are a strategy of empowerment: The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be [...] This wandering of the semantic produced by the masses makes some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.10 Walking is framed as an elementary and embodied form of experiencing urban space – a productive speaking/writing of the city, it is a ‘stubborn procedure that eludes discipline.’11 The wilful stories told by the walker are also the scattered stories of diasporic people who inscribe their identities and self-hoods in the textures of a globalised and transnational web of relations that cannot go back to the ordering systems of empire and colonialism. It is then no coincidence that Strolling actually does stroll, following the paths of its speakers through the city. Strolling interrupts the text of the city through both pedestrian and verbal speech acts. The subjects in Strolling move through their neighbourhoods and communities, such as the boroughs Willesden, Dalston or Ealing. In telling their own stories while also walking through their home, their own personalised city, they go against a pervasive visual rhetoric of nationality as can be seen in London, the former heart of the Empire, and its symbols, monuments, geographical sites. 4. Conclusion: Counter-Spaces The walker or stroller is a creator of a diasporic multi-sited elsewhere and everywhere. Both the online platform YouTube and the material space of the city set the stage for Strolling’s dialogues but at the same time are transformed into creative and artistic virtual and urban counter-spaces. As a cultural and visual strategy to reverse oppressive dynamics, Strolling shows its subjects as speaking against exclusionary and marginalising tendencies at work in British society. As a consequence of the erasure of Black British experience at an ideological level and

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__________________________________________________________________ a response to the question ‘No, but where are you really from?’, Strolling constitutes a new way of living and engaging with diasporic identity constructs. As Homi Bhabha has aptly said: It is to the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation […] It is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is there that, in our time, the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced.12 In combining the virtual space of the internet and the physical space of the city, Strolling is both placeless and firmly in place, increasing the visibility and volume of voices usually ignored or silenced.

Notes 1

Cecile Emeke, “’I Want To Give A Voice To Young Black People’ – Strolling Web Series,” on Afropunk (August 27, 2014), n. pag. Viewed 2 May 2016, . 2 Alexis Okeowo, “Watch ‘Strolling,’ a Powerful Web Series About the African Diaspora,” on The New Yorker (March 11. 2016), n. pag. Viewed 2 May 2016, . 3 Ibid. 4 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. 5 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 173. 6 Ibid. 7 John Bell, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 8. 8 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Da Capo Press, [1863] 1964), 9. 9 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97. 10 Ibid., 101. 11 Ibid., 96. 12 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 243.

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Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. –––, ‘Here and Now.’ In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 206-34. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bell, John Clement. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Baudelaire, Charles. ‘The Painter of Modern Life.’ In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated by Jonathan Mayne, 1-35. New York: Da Capo Press, [1863] 1964. Certeau, Michel de. ‘Walking in the City.’ In The Practice of Everyday Life, 91110. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Emeke, Cecile. “Strolling.” On Youtube. 2014–Ongoing. Viewed 2 May 2016 . –––, ‘“I Want To Give A Voice To Young Black People” – Strolling Web Series.’ On Afropunk. 27 August 2014. Viewed 02 May 2016, . Mercer, Kobena. “Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diasporabased Blackness.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 190-203. New York: Routledge, 2002. Okeowo, Alexis. ‘Watch Strolling, a Powerful Web Series About the African Diaspora.’ In The New Yorker. 11 March 2016. Viewed 02 May 2016, .

Jennifer Leetsch teaches at University of Würzburg, Germany. Currently, she is working on her doctoral thesis on postcolonial romance (‘The Wiggle Space of Love’). Her other research interests include Disability Studies, Queer Studies and contemporary Black British women writers.