Whose Diaspora?

Art Journal

ISSN: 0004-3249 (Print) 2325-5307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaj20

Whose Diaspora? Tobias Wofford To cite this article: Tobias Wofford (2016) Whose Diaspora?, Art Journal, 75:1, 74-79, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2016.1171542 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2016.1171542

Published online: 06 May 2016.

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12. See Claudia Mattos, “Whither Art History: Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” Art Bulletin 96, no. 3 (September 2014): 259–64.

lar engagement with diversity. How might artists and art historians use theory to productively examine the work of artists with intersectional identities (or work of diverse media) without continuing to relegate those artists and objects to the margins?12 Is there a productive way to move beyond the classification of objects, institutions, or people? As a woman of color in the academy, the issue of diversity is always on my mind—both personally and professionally. Our hope with this forum is to reposition the issue of diversity from one of “privileged knowledge” to one of shared responsibility.

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Jordana Moore Saggese is associate professor of contemporary art and theory at California College of the Arts, where she is also chair of the visual studies program. Her first book, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, was published by University of California Press in 2014.

Diaspora has gained expanding currency in cultural studies as a critical category for describing the effects of globalization on individuals and communities as they move around the world. Today we can read about queer diasporas, Asian diasporas, Indian diasporas, and Iranian diasporas, to name only a few.1 The range of subjects explored through the lens of diaspora suggests the potential for the term to bring diversity into art-historical discourses while also challenging normalized categories of difference to which we have become accustomed. Tobias Wofford Yet, as an addendum to so many different identities and groups, Whose Diaspora? the invocation of diaspora can often waver between an expansiveness that is almost meaningless and a particularity that offers a compelling strategy for critiquing and analyzing difference in the face of globalism. Therein lies the rub; one cannot adequately discuss diaspora as a unified or universal phenomenon. As Steven Nelson has put it, diaspora is characterized by multiplicity—“multiple practices, multiple world views.”2 An account of diaspora in any measure must be accompanied by the particularity of the diasporic subjects in question. In short, in examining diaspora we must always ask, “Whose 1. A quick search of the keyword “diaspora” on WorldCat—a global database of library collecdiaspora?” With attention to the particular experiences of dispersal and the varytions—yielded 39,950 books and 3,684 articles ing strategies of diaspora identity mobilized by each diasporic subject, a diaspora among the hits (search conducted July 24, 2015). art history can indeed offer both insights and challenges to the historical analysis While a search of “diaspora and art” yields mostly studies exploring the African and Jewish and narration of diversity in art and culture. diasporas, one will also find texts on queer Puerto Diaspora is by no means a new term—originally used in the third-century Rican artists, Iranian artists, Chinese artists, and more. Significant studies include: Isabelle Thuy BCE to reference the dispersal of the Jewish diaspora.3 It was only in the latter Pelaud, Lan P. Duong, Mariam B. Lam, and Kathy part of the twentieth century that diaspora was expanded as a theoretical frame to L. Nguyen, eds., Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the describe not only communities dispersed through violence, as with the Jewish Diaspora (Seattle: University of Washington Press, and African diasporas, but also communities, cultures, individuals, and even art 2014); Saloni Mathur, ed., The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Williamstown: objects spread globally under the conditions of late capitalism.4 In fact, it may be Clark Art Institute, 2011); Lawrence La Fountainprecisely the flows of global capitalism and its new forms of mass media that Stokes, Queer Ricans: Culture and Sexualities in the make diaspora particularly prevalent today, as it provides individuals new means Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Jonathan Harris, Identity Theft: through which to organize themselves into what Arjun Appadurai referred to as The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art “diasporic public spheres.”5 As a result of this recent opening up of the term, one (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008); and Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global encounters diaspora theories deployed in a dizzying array of disciplines and Postmodernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, applied in studies that variously define identity and community. Still, diaspora 2001). 2. Steven Nelson, “Diaspora and Contemporary theories do often follow a set of shared assumptions about the usefulness of Art: Multiple Practices, Multiple Worldviews,” studying the impact of migration. For, while the causes of the dispersal of diain Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 296–316. sporic communities and individuals might be different, the term is appropriate 74

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3. Ibid., 296. 4. See James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): 302–38. John Peffer has made convincing arguments that even artworks can form a sort of diaspora. Peffer, “Africa’s Diaspora of Images,” Third Text 19, no. 4 (July 2005): 339–55. 5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 6. Matthew Orr and Vijai Singh, “Being Garifuna,” New York Times video, January 14, 2012, at www. nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/for-many-latinosrace-is-more-culture-than-color.html?_r=1, as of November 18, 2015. See also Mireya Navarro, “For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color,” New York Times, January 13, 2012, at www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/for-manylatinos-race-is-more-culture-than-color.html?_r=1, as of November 18, 2015. 7. On the Garifuna, see James Cheney, “Malleable Identities: Placing the Garinagu in New Orleans,” Journal of Latin American Geography 11, no. 2 (2012): 121–44.

in describing the struggles undertaken to uphold cultural affinities with a homeland (real or imagined) and to maintain narratives of dislocation from that homeland. As such, diasporic communities and identities are centered on difference. They resist, or in some cases are denied, complete assimilation into their new, dispersed contexts; representing and propagating their own difference through various acts of remembrance and art is often a stage and medium for such acts of remembrance. In this way, theories of diaspora can prove helpful in elucidating how art forms become enmeshed in the processes of movement and migration, but such theories also stand apart from related concepts such as transnationalism, which focuses on networks of global flows rather than the experiences of dispersal or strategies of identification based on the concept of lost or distant origins. Further, in their dispersed contexts, diasporic conceptions of belonging can disrupt locally rooted identities and trouble forms of classification and canonization so central to academia and the discipline of art history. For example, diaspora helps to explain the contentious debates over racial categorization among Garifuna communities in the United States. The Garifunas maintain a hybrid culture, partially of African descent, from the Caribbean and Central America. Members of this group immigrating to the United States have found it difficult to categorize themselves racially using the measures of diversity set up in the US census. In a 2012 New York Times piece, the Garifunas interviewed embraced their Garifuna identities, accentuating their cultural affiliations with their communities in Honduras and the Caribbean in order to resist assimilation into the Black community in the United States.6 Thus American measures of race and belonging were challenged. In fact, even canonical narratives of diaspora were challenged by the Garifunas who were essentially a diaspora within a diaspora—resisting assimilation into the African American community which is itself often framed as exemplary of the African diaspora. The Garifunas, as with many diasporic communities, have histories of migration from which a range of ethnic, racial, and national affiliations can be strategically mobilized in articulating their identity.7 Their case suggests that within diaspora studies, the question of whose diaspora is framed as the representative diaspora should always be brought forward and examined. More generally, the example of Garifuna communities highlights not only the critical need to reassess categories of race in the United States, but also the need to sufficiently grapple with the processes of globalization that have created a diversity of communities whose members live their lives and experience their subjectivities differently than their neighbors. The negotiation of subjectivity and identity through global migration experienced by Garifuna communities is an increasingly common phenomenon. In the context of globalization, contemporary artists constantly negotiate their subjectivities in light of their own movement around the world. Such artists are often called on to represent their homeland and their cultural difference in global exhibitions. An important interest for art historians using theories of diaspora is to understand more fully how art can shed light on notions of origins, narratives of dispersal, and cultural difference under the conditions of globalization. With this in mind, I offer the following points regarding the potential contributions a diaspora art history can make toward reassessing diversity within the field:

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1. The study of diaspora culture is a study of hybrid subjectivities. As individuals and communities move around the globe, they are constantly changed by their new contexts and by the experience of dispersal. At the same time diaspora cultures also produce their difference with other populations in their dispersed contexts, a difference that is often expressed through an orientation toward origins and that always results in new hybrid subjectivities.

Allan Sekula, Ladies Auxillary Polish Army Veterans of World War II, Polish Constitution Day Parade, 3 May 2008, from Polonia and Other Fables, 2008, chromogenic print, 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm) (artwork © The Estate of Allan Sekula)

2. Through the emphasis on notions of homeland and narratives of dispersal, the study of diaspora is inherently historically oriented. Diaspora culture embodies the lasting effects of the many-layered processes of globalization and the production of difference. As such, it should concern itself not only with hybrid subjectivities but also with how such subjectivities come into being. This concept is demonstrated in Allan Sekula’s photographic series Polonia and Other Fables, which chronicles the Polish diaspora. Focusing on workers of Polish descent in the United States, Sekula’s work depicts subjects who seem enmeshed in the same mundane global systems as most Americans. Yet the series slowly reveals the ways in which their Polish identity is maintained and created through family gatherings, religious 76

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communities, and nationalist cultural events. Sekula provides a historical documentation of Polish people dispersed around the world while also exposing the subtle processes that make “Polonia” possible. Theories of diaspora help to better account for the globalizing processes that have created the subjects of Sekula’s work as well as the Chinatowns, Little Ethiopias, Little Italys, and myriad other dispersed communities found in cities and suburbs all around the world.

Yinka Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian Dandy 14:00 Hours, 1998, C-type print, 72 x 90 in. (183 x 228.6 cm) (artwork © Yinka Shonibare MBE, all rights reserved, DACS/ARS, NY 2015)

3. The study of diaspora offers a way to account for artistic resistance to universality and the generalizing tendencies of globalization. International artists are often (and aptly) framed by terms like transnationalism, nomadism, or cosmopolitanism because such artists and their work circulate in networks that traverse and contest national borders. Nevertheless, such framings run the risk of an illusory erasure of difference or a romanticization of mobility that T. J. Demos has critiqued as conflicting with the uneven experience of migration in our fraught post-9/11 era.8 Because diasporic expressions often explicitly resist the cultural amnesia of globalization by embracing identity, diaspora theories offer new possibilities for understanding the role

8. T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during the Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 5–18.

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of difference in contemporary global art. However, in addition to analyzing how artists mobilize their origins in their art, diaspora art history must also account for the ways in which artists may represent difference in the context of a global art market that demands such representation. For example, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei creates works that often employ the global art languages of conceptualism and installation while maintaining important cultural signifiers that tie the works to the artist’s Chinese homeland. As these works (and the artist himself ) travel globally, they gain new meanings and contexts couched in a system of difference that functions much like diaspora —representing “China” to Western audiences and “the West” to Chinese audiences.9 Yet, while Ai’s critical take on both global art and Chinese cultural policy often proves troubling to some (resulting in his well-publicized arrests), the demand for such art by global art markets is palpable. One may begin to wonder if the taste for difference represented by diaspora in contemporary art may result from new technologies of subjection through which global capitalism exerts its power over previously elusive persons and cultures.10

9. This reading of Ai Weiwei’s work is inspired by John Tain’s in-depth analysis of the artist’s diasporic dimensions at the “Diasporic Trajectories and Sited Encounters” panel, Johns Hopkins University, October 11, 2011. 10. On the demand for difference in global art markets, see Tobias Wofford, “Facing History through the Art of Georges Adeagbo,” Chicago Art Journal 19 (Fall 2009): 65–78. 11. Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 6–31. 12. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001). 13. For an exploration of diasporic artistic expression in Kingston’s nightclub culture and beyond, see Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

4. Diaspora can provide insights to the “host” community as well as the diasporic community. Through the lens of difference, the study of diaspora offers the possibility of reassessing dominant cultural modes in new ways. As Krista Thompson describes it, diaspora embodies “a sidelong glance” with which to reassess Western visuality.11 The works of artists like Yinka Shonibare and exhibitions like the 2001 Unpacking Europe are examples of how such reassessments can be done. Shonibare is famous for sculptures and installations of Victorian fashions redraped in Dutch-wax fabric and for photographs in which the artist inserts himself into elaborately staged photo-dramas about the Victorian bourgeoisie. These works recall the role of Africa in the making of the British Empire. Further, in this age of Masterpiece Theater and historical reenactment, Shonibare’s photographic series Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) highlights the selective memory in British notions of history and obsessions with self-image as much as it explores the artist’s own subjectivity. Similarly, Unpacking Europe, an exhibition curated by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, explored constructions of “Europeanness” often through works created by non-Western and diasporic artists.12 The above points suggest the potential inherent in art-historical studies of diaspora identities and processes. But we must again return to the question of whose diaspora is being represented. For, admittedly, my examples are largely contemporary studio artists working within the sphere of the global art market. They hardly offer a complete representation of the processes of globalization and the cultural forms thus produced, even if they are framed as such by their respective studies (the present one included). Diaspora is also seen in the visual culture of practices as diverse as Toronto’s Caribana Festival, Atlanta’s Hindu temples, and the dance halls of Kingston, Jamaica.13 Diaspora art history has the potential of expanding beyond the limitations of the art market to explore art and culture that circulates through other means. This issue raises an interesting methodological problem in the study of diaspora culture that I think can be productively examined in the light of diversity practices. Especially within the study of the African 78

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14. This understanding is inspired, in part, by Judith Bettelheim’s observations regarding a divide between art historians who explore “art of the street” and those who examine the work of studio-trained artists, in a presentation on the “African Diaspora Art History: State of the Field” panel at the 2010 CAA Annual Conference, Chicago. 15. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984). 16. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2000); Stuart Hall, Sarat Maharaj, Sarah Campbell, and Gilane Tawadros, Modernity and Difference (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001); Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 17. Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2009), 14.

diaspora, I have noticed two different and competing art-historical models for exploring diaspora culture:14 On the one hand, there are what I consider the structuralist or anthropological models that emphasize retention of traditional culture; assuming the stability of the sign despite the experience of dispersal. With their interest in cultural systems and enduring cultural signs, such studies can help expose subaltern histories and art traditions. They elucidate the roots of traditions like the sequined drapo of Haitian vodou, even while written historical records may be scarce. However, such art-historical work often fails to account sufficiently for the agency of its producers or fluidity of meaning in artistic practice. Melville Herskovits’s discussions of “Africanisms” retained in the cultural traditions of the African diaspora in the New World is an early example of this tendency, but Robert Farris Thompson’s seminal text, Flash of the Spirit, is perhaps the most influential of such studies.15 On the opposite end, there are the poststructuralist models that favor diaspora as an articulation and embrace the inherent instability of the sign. Such cultural analysis, seen in the examples of Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer, emphasizes the malleability of identity and the creation of cultural difference through the experience of migration, dislocation, and creolization.16 This is certainly the understanding of diaspora deployed by Nicholas Bourriaud in describing a major trend of contemporary art that emphasizes “the fact that, in this era of the altermodern, displacement has become a method of depiction, and that artistic styles and formats must henceforth be regarded from the viewpoint of diaspora, migration and exodus.”17 Such art-historical work, however, tends to rely on the alterity of the artists in question. Thus it maintains an emphasis on contemporary art, privileging contemporary studio-trained artists as representative of diaspora processes and mistaking individuals of privileged voice as paradigmatic of diaspora in the global sphere. Certainly, many art historians and cultural analysts employ a mixture of these methodologies in the same texts. The tension between the two strategies may be more indicative of broader art-historical problems as we attempt to answer questions of identity and difference in art and art making. Yet it also suggests that diaspora studies resist grouping into a single discipline or even a coherent set of theories. Diaspora has seen diverse theoretical uses and has been applied to a range of traditions and communities that are as multitudinous as the experience of globalization. Any study of diaspora must be particular to such experiences and must ultimately answer the question: whose diaspora? Tobias Wofford is assistant professor in the department of art and art history at Santa Clara University. He received his PhD from UCLA. His current research explores the meeting of globalization, diaspora, and identity in African American art since the 1950s.

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