POSTMODERN IDENTITY POLITICS?
Producing the antithesis of the modernist spectacle, some indigenous scholars and artists made overt political interventions phrased in the language of feminism, multiculturalism and social activism. The content of their performances on this day resonated more comfortably with scenarios of politically-motivated performance art with which many Encuentro participants would be familiar.
The postmodern crises in anthropology and high art threw the modernist regime of spectatorship into disarray. The idea that cultural and racial Others could be producers and critics, rather than just subjects of representations saturated disciplinary and institutional critiques, profoundly affecting artistic and ethnographic praxis from the 1970s through the 1990s. The critique of the power relations surrounding the acquisition and representation of anthropological knowledge by artists, cultural critics, and self-reflexive anthropologists characterized the ethos of this theoretical moment. Satirical self-exoticizing performances reversed “the gaze,” revealing the structural similarities in the ways social science, popular, and high culture appropriated and mediated subaltern culture.
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Self”-representation by artists of ethnic and racial minorities became a hot subversive topic in the art world (Berger 1993, Fusco and Wallis, Solomon-Godeau). Prototypical of this moment was the praxis of Native American Jimmie Durham, Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco, and Fred Wilson, whose ethno-kitsch objects, performances, and installations (in dialogue with post-structuralist and post-colonial deconstruction) metacommunicativly challenged the social and institutional relations underlaying cultural production (Berger 2001, Lippard, Taylor 1998, Fusco, Fusco and Heredia).
In Anthropology, the ideas that native people, formerly objects of ethnography, had become a critical audience, that anthropologists had ethical obligations to their subjects that superseded the imperative to produce objective scientific knowledge, and that anthropologist and subject were coeval –existing in the same time and place, in a dialogical relationship, transformed the discipline (Brettell, Clifford, Fabian, Hymes, Marcus: 1998, Marcus and Fischer, Marcus and Clifford, Ortner).
During this period, an interdisciplinary, emancipatory discourse heavily saturated with liberal humanist ideals gained salience in the academy. Cornell West identified a “new cultural politics of difference” –the “articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy, and individuality. This perspective impels these cultural critics and artists to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts.” A dimension of this self-critical political commitment was a belief in empowerment through self-representation for those historically denied the means of self-representation, described by Marx, as the colonized who do not represent themselves, but are represented (hooks, Solomon-Godeau 26).
At the Encuentro, the critical ideal of “giving voice” was reflected in the structure of the courtyard performance in general, where indigenous people were officially and publicly given the opportunity to contribute cultural performances; it was also implicit in the performances of the Maori and feminist activists, who did not merely acquiescently accept the opportunity to represent their “cultures” per the usual schema, but who seized directorial power to challenge the premises of the event itself, and to re-frame themselves as mediators between audience and other indigenous peoples. These politics were most obviously enacted by Calcumil, through her invitation to the Kayapo women to express themselves.
While these currents in Western academic cultural theory may shed light on how some of these performances were intended to be interpreted, the extreme inter-culturality of this event complicates the application of a postmodernist framework to the events that transpired. It was easy to position oneself in relation to the comparative the sequence of indigenous performances –whether taken as an avant garde or another type of performance. The performances of the Kaiapó and Maxacalí that were unaccompanied by exegesis, Larry Yazzie’s Fancy Dance and speech, and the Aztec Fire Dance apparently respected the horizontal, incorporative principles of cultural relativism and multiculturalism that informed the performance. Although of a different genre, the spoken discourses of Calcumil and the Maori scholar were also familiar to spectators with liberal arts educations. The challenge of subaltern actors to dominant paradigms, is by now, a familiar scenario; however, the interaction between indigenous performers was more difficult to digest.
A convention implicit in the words of some of the performers, although by no means necessarily universally shared, was the universalizing, essentializing modernist construction of “the native” –but, rather than an imposed stereotype, it was used as an identification that created solidarity and similarity between diverse groups. As Third World critiques of Western Feminism have revealed, universalizing, liberatory, antisystemic movements often inadvertently perpetuate ethnocentric values, beliefs, and hierarchies. The more obviously politically-motivated interventions which spoke on behalf of all indigenous people took the Kaiapó or Maxacalí as their frame of reference and incorporated their bodies (but I would argue not their subjectivities) into their own performances of indigenousness. Were they appropriating the “authenticity” of the groups of indigenes that many conference attendees felt were qualitatively different and more authentically indigenous than the more elite indigenous cultural critics? Or were these acts dialogical attempts to bridge cultural differences, as their overt content explained in the colonial languages of English and Spanish?
The specificities of the indigenous groups present, separated by language, nationality, and culture, but nonetheless united by their common experience of subordination within their own nation-states and of cooperation with sympathetic transnational allies, produces a tension with the universalizing discourse of indigeneity. The performances hailed fragmented and shifting identifications. Were you indigenous? feminist? hispanophone? First world? Who could you understand, relate to --who were you in this space? The compression of time and space evinced by the gathering of actors from across the Americas and beyond did not create the homogenizing, psychically flat space theorists predicted would characterize late capitalism or globalization. Rather, local identity and authenticity were the currency of the economy of cosmopolitan indigenous performance.
The disruption of a segregated cultural space with representations of a cultural critic’s minority group identity is a well-developed postmodernist scenario that contests the modernist unidirectional gaze. However, here it was inflected with power-relations that were at times troubling and difficult to support. Gender and inter-indigenous hierarchies were revealed. The heterogeneity of the indigenous peoples, their interests, goals, material and cultural resources, languages, cultures, as well as the fact that indigenous performers were also audience members, and that spectators became implicated in performances, made it difficult to distinguish dyadic dominant and subaltern roles along the racialized lines that are often theorized as separating these roles.