WITNESSING AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

This search for identity I have embarked upon continuously spirals away from the straightforward course I envisaged. I feel as if I am sailing along the outer rim of a Sargasso Sea, straining against a current pulling me closer in to the eye of the whirlpool. The current engagement is with identity politics. This area concerns propositions that focus on the aspirations of particular social interest groups whose political views may be shaped by aspects of their personal identity such as race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation or some other characteristic. Many groups (African-Americans, Hispanic, Anglo-Indian, Native American etc.) have been actively promoting their political identity for some time. The writing of and about this identity has been with us for some considerable time. The signs and images witnessing the process have been displayed all round us for some time. In the later half of the 20^th century, the most influential of these political identities has been that of gender. The feminist movement has mushroomed in its effect on all western societies and is now a global concern, going behind the Muslim veil, deconstructing the cast system and many other societies and cultures where women have been traditionally subservient. The work of Judith Butler, Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and many others, has been remarkable in its influence.

Minh-Ha

I recently came across the work of Professor Trinh Minh-ha, in particular When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, gender and cultural politics (Routledge 1991). She is one of these extraordinary women. In an interview in 1993 she stated:

“I rarely think in terms of message. I think more in terms of processes of transformation. Every film that I make, for example, is a transformative process for me. I mean by that that whenever I start a film, I may start with an idea, an image or an impression. By the time I finish the film, lam somewhere else altogether, even though 1 have not lost what I started out with. In the process of making the film your consciousness has changed considerably. 

 It's the same with writing. I am not writing just to give a message, even though in my writings and my films I am always concerned with something that is very specific. For example, the subject that you have deliberately decided to focus on would be the site around which your energy would deploy. But, on the other hand, the subject is not all that there is in writing, and in filmmaking. One should always offer the reader and the viewer something else than just the subject. And that something else has to do with writing itself and with the tools that define your activities as a writer or a filmmaker. By focusing on these, you also offer the reader or the viewer your social positioning-how you position yourself as a writer and a filmmaker in society. So these are the issues that I immediately face in writing and in filmmaking.”

There are a couple of other passages from her book Moon Waxes Red:

“An objective constantly claimed by those who ‘seek to reveal one society to another’ is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view’ and “to realise his vision of his world.’ […] The injunction to see things from the native’s point of view speaks for a definite ideology of truth and authenticity; it lies at the centre of every polemical discussion on ‘reality’ in its relation to ‘beauty’ and ‘truth.’…To raise the question of representing the Other is, therefore, to reopen endlessly the fundamental issue of science and art; documentary and fiction; universal and personal; objectivity and subjectivity; masculine and feminine; outside and insider.”

“Whether we choose to concentrate on another culture, or on our own culture, our work will always be cross-cultural. It is bound to be so…not only because of…personal background and historical actualities, but also and above all because of the heterogeneous reality we all live today, in postmodern times – a reality, therefore, that is not a mere crossing from one borderline to the other or that is not merely double, but a reality that involves the crossing of an indeterminate number of borderlines, one that remains multiple in its hyphenation.’

Ms Minh-Ha goes on:

“Multiculturalism does not lead us very far if it remains a question of difference only between one culture and another. Differences should also be understood within the same culture, just as multiculturalism as an explicit condition of our times exists within every self. Intercultural, intersubjective, interdisciplinary. These are some of the keywords that keep circulating in artistic and educational as well as political milieu. To cut across boundaries and borderlines is to live aloud the malaise of categories and labels; it is to resist simplistic attempts at classifying, to resist the comfort of belonging to a classification, and of producing classifiable works.”

I would submit that the textual displays, signs and images, appearing all around us are evidence of identities and give witness to their existence within this multicultural world and the many levels within it.

Here is a film of a talk on witnessing given at the Gender and Women’s Stuidies Department at UC Berkeley, featuring the amazing Professor Patricia J. Williams and Professor Trinh Minh-ha.  Very much worth a view: