Title: Identity, Community and the Post-Colonial Experience of Migrancy
Abstract: The imbrication of the personal and the social is one of the enduring projects of feminism (Spivak, 1988). It is also the theme of the revolutionary verses (at right), which I recall as being among the best loved and often quoted in my native language Urdu. In these words poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz traces how his coming to social consciousness and the awareness of the ugliness of oppression inescapably altered the expression of his passion. Describing the history of oppression and the suffering of his people he ends by saying: No longer can I avert my gaze from these (the injustices), Nor, despite the allure of your beauty, deny the knowledge, That there is other pain in life than the yearnings of love And desires other than the desire for the beloved. So do not seek from me the purity of past passion (my translation). By conceiving of the line between postcolonial and discourse as diffused rather than sharply defined, (1) we can begin to theorize our individual gendered experiences as narratives of the multiple intersections between the personal and the social-political as well as between the postcolonial present/future and our colonial pasts. In this paper I want to look at the idiom of migrancy -- conceptualized by Sara Suleri as a condition of movement between regions, locales and cultural spaces (Suleri, 1992) -- and the consequent blurring of the and which marks the act of migration from the cultural, social and political spheres of the so-called Third World into of the First. My use of the term postcolonial is intended not so much to imply a periodization of colonial experience but as to indicate the condition of consciousness is restless and investigative; it is in the sense Bhabha (1994) explains the present day use of terms such as postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminism that insistently gesture to the beyond (and) only embody its restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and excentric site of experience and empowerment, (Bhabha, 1994, p. 4). In this respect, this article (2) itself demands to be read as a series of transition points in an ongoing attempt to map the developing of a discontinuous consciousness from seemingly sequential narratives. This exercise, as has been documented by many women of colour upon migrating to academies in the geographical West, (3) forces an investigation into how domination and resistance are played out as we relocate ourselves in the cultural/intellectual West. Some of these discussions focus upon the diversity of subjectivities and positionings mark our ways of conceptualizing identity and community, the kinds of desires and omissions are expressed or concealed in alteritism, or Otherness as an act of resistance, and how these have an impact on the relations into which we enter in the postcolonial experience of migrancy. The search for a comfort-giving home in an environment permeated with colonialist assumptions about our cultural identities makes the experience of migrancy for many of us a bizarre re-enactment of the colonial encounter to which our histories are inextricably linked. Since immigrating to Canada from Pakistan three years ago, the realization of Eurocentric dominance and its inherent power to Other me in the cultural and social context of everyday life re-presented the notion of coloniality for me in a way a life-long awareness of my country's history of (direct) British colonial rule and later (U.S.) imperialist domination had not done. How we are positioned in this encounter and how we position ourselves shapes the social relations we enter into in our new country. For me it has entailed an inquiry into aspects of my own life as a student in the public environment of feminist studies classrooms and my continuing private struggle with the tensions between feminist praxis and the notion of community in this multicultural advanced capitalist society. …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-12-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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