Associação Cultural Videobrasil

DISOTHERING AS METHOD[i] (LEH ZO, A ME KE NDE ZA)

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

 

“I dislike interviews. I’m often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.” Mona Hatoum, interview with Janine Antoni[ii]

   

Just in the nick of time when we, by repetition and reiteration, start believing the concepts we have postulated and disseminated; just at that point in time, when we think that the notion of post[1]otherness[iii] —which we have reflected upon for years in reference to that double moment of awareness and transition—begins to actualize, we seem to experience a quake that pushes us to reconsider, but not reject, the paradoxicality of the Post-Other moment,[iv]  reconsider who and how one bears historical Othering, reconsider the mechanisms of rendering Other, as well as reconsidering who represents whom or who tries to shape whose future in contemporary societies and discourses.

This quake has spurred on the necessity to drop off prefixes and concentrate on root words. It seems as if, to be able to reconsider, one needs to, at least temporarily, abrogate “Post” to be able to situate “Otherness” within our days’ context. Especially, taking into account that the “Post” in Post-Otherness might be dangling off a cliff, threatening to fall either on the side of the “Post” in “Postcolonial”—which doesn’t imply an aftermath but rather intends to announce a continuity of an era shaped by its colonial past—or drop on the side of “Post-racial”—which tends to be a distraction from metamorphosed formats and technologies of racisms. At any rate, this proposal announces the descaling of the prefix in order to scrutinize “Otherness” properly.

This quake has been prompted by three random observations:

Firstly, if one, even with a minimum of sensitivity, took a glance at some current political headlines, one is likely to hear the reverberations of discourses ranging from building walls to separate nations to discussions of “bad Hombres” and of the Islamization of the Occident. As Sasha Polakow-Suransky puts it:

They (the Right) have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism – as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.[v]

This becomes interesting as one observes the efforts of the right to co-opt certain historically “Othered” subjects with their political strategies, brewing new alliances and forging common denominators that were historically regarded as contradictory, while constructing other “Others” upon which long[1]cultivated angst, prejudices, and resentments could be projected. This process should be understood as a cannibalization of “Otherness” and a subsequent regurgitation of “Otherness.”

For some historically “Othered” subjects, the only thing that has changed has been the mechanisms and methodologies through which they are objectified and othered.

So, in our sociopolitical contemporary, one can rather observe an intensification in the construction and cultivation of “Otherness,” morphing old conceptions of the “Other” to cloth new groups of people, while at the same time one can observe the appropriation of the “Other” for purposes profitable to the privileged and powerful.

Secondly, one can observe, especially within the context of the cultural industry, the resurfacing of what one might call “geographical specification-ing,” which is to say, the need to put a spotlight on certain geographical regions. This is of course not a new phenomenon, especially within Western museum institutions, or other cultural infrastructures in which, based on certain cultural and political agendas or strategies, certain geographical regions are put in and out of focus at will. Some have seen this practice as part of what is termed “Soft power,” whereby culture is used as a means to gently exercise political power on certain cultural and social groups. Take for example a museum or library in France which chooses to put a spotlight on Algeria, in the hope that it would appease the Algerian community and soothe or clean the wounds of its colonial past. Or take for example the British Council, the Goethe Institute, or the Institut Français opening cultural centers around the world to “promote culture.” Soft power.

This “geographical specification-ing” is not bad, per se. The long list of, for example, “African shows” or “Arab world shows” around the world did indeed do a great deal in presenting to the world what an African or Arab contemporary could be. That said and that done, one must now take stance to ask: what does it mean to do an “Africa” exhibition or an “Arab” exhibition today, as we have seen at the New Museum, MMK Frankfurt, BOZAR Brussels, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and many other museums in the West?[vi]  What does it mean to make geography the subject matter rather than conceptual or philosophical discourses of relevance? What about issues of representation? How would one represent the fifty-four African countries, thousands of African languages, and communities within such an exhibition? These necessitate re-questioning and reconsidering.

But what prompts this reflection now are the following suspicions:

Primarily, while “geographical specification-ing” might be well-intentioned, one can’t avoid thinking of the fact that the occasional presentation of an Africa, Arab, Asia, or similar shows is another, and, for that matter, a reinforced act of “Othering.” This suspicion is brought about by the fact that institutions tend to content themselves with the fact that they have done an “Africa show” and therefore do not necessarily need to put in other artists of African origin in their regular program. Such “geographical specification-ing” projects then tend to become a compensation for a lack of proper engagement with issues of diversity at the level of program, personnel, and public and also tend to trust the “Other” they construct into the “Savage slot,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would put it. Secondly, there is something about the rhetoric through which such “geographical specification-ing” projects are accommodated. By this I mean the rhetoric of “giving a voice to,” “giving space to,” “making visible,” “taking care of,” “making heard” the African, Asian, Arab, or whoever in question. These phenomena which could be likened to paternalization and infantilization strategies push us to think of Gayatri Spivak’s pertinent question “Can the Subaltern Speak?”[vii] But since Spivak, we have learnt that the issue at stake is not whether the subaltern can speak, but rather, as Seloua Luste Boulbina twists the saying, “Can the non-Subaltern Listen?” The crucial question is whether these geo-social groups stereotypically put together in such shows, especially in Western museums, do actually wish to be given a voice, space, or otherwise? And under whose terms? Don’t they already have their spaces and voices? Again, the issue at stake is the agenda behind such rhetoric, and the fact that this rhetoric is indeed an important part of the process of constructing and cultivating “Otherness” within a bubble. Which is to say that the exclusive mechanism in relation to such projects marks a difference between a constructed “norm” and the constructed “anomaly,” which is the one-off, spaceship-like project that lands and then disappears.

Thirdly, it is important to point to the capitalist economic model lying behind such “geographical specification-ing” projects. The use of slogans, captions, and simplifications is the epitome of Neoliberal economic practice. This goes hand in hand with the concept of Soft power, wherein culture is not only used for political aims but also serves to shift and control the economic paradigm. In the past years, we have heard from philosophers, economists, and politicians alike that the future of the world will be determined in Africa. Prompt was the reaction from the cultural sector, with projects like “African Futures,” “Africa Is the Future,” and various sorts of “Afrofuturisms,” as tags and labels well packaged for easy sales. It all becomes a commodity. The commodification of the “Other” and of “Otherness.”

But it’s worth taking a few steps back to reflect. Otherness as a phenomenon seems to have always existed in many societies all over, and rendering “Other” as a process seems inherent in processes of identity formation of individuals and societies. In Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies,[viii] it is reiterated that “the existence of others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own place in the world.”[ix]  That is to say, for an individual or society to know or define itself, it needs to define another individual or society which the former individual or society is not or doesn’t wish to be. Often a time the “Other” then becomes a projection surface for all sorts of unwanted identitarian characteristics. That is the thin line that separates the mere wish to ‘other’ in order to find one’s own identity, and othering that is discriminatory and segregational. But if one is the other, then who is “another”?

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin are fast to point out that it is often an interchangeable position of other and othering counterparts, where power probably determines who objectifies at what time. One is tempted to think that “geographical specification-ing” projects are then vehicles through which such power gradients are defined, and through which binaries of norm and anomaly, or self and other are defined. This of course applies to all categories through which majority and minority identities are defined and cultivated in relation to political, economic, and social power and how they come to define race, cultural, gender, and class identities, geographies, geopolitics, and economics.

From a feminist discourse and practice vantage point, Cherríe Moraga pointed out that “what the oppressor often succeeds in doing is simply externalizing his fears, projecting them into the bodies of women, Asians, gays, disabled folks, whoever seems most ‘other.’”[x]  Without wanting to equate the “otherer,” the one enjoying the privilege of making another “other,” with the oppressor, Moraga’s argument holds ground with the tendency of the “otherer” externalizing and projecting his or her fears on another in the enactment of othering. Moraga proceeds with an expatiation on the phenomenon:

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shitted on. He fears the immobilization threatened by his own incipient guilt. He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different. He fears the hatred, anger, and vengeance of those he has hurt.[xi]

Taking this into consideration, what could “Dis[1]Othering” possibly imply?

Perhaps dis-othering starts with the recognition of the acts and processes of othering. With the revelation of the undercurrents that feed, justify, enable, and maintain acts and processes of othering. It is in and upon this awareness and consciousness of and towards these acts and processes of othering that one might be able to build resistance and protect oneself both from being othered and from the urge to other. Which is to say, it is in this recognition of the mechanism or technology of othering that a circumventing of the embodiments of both noun and verb—the othered and othering—can be achieved.

Dis-othering could imply any effort to resist the internalization of any constructs that are said to make one that “other.” The tendency is to see oneself through the prism of the constructor of otherness or the oppressor, which is to say that faced with the violence of continuous belittling or jammed in that space of the savage slot in which one has been thrusted, the psyche of the “othered” forces that being to accept an existence within a marginal and liminal space.

Disothering must be a self-break, a self-resistance by the “otherer” to externalize his or her fears, aches, and longings to any being considered a possible recipient. Therefore, with the term “Dis-Othering” I wish to propose the phenomenon in which social identity building is not made by projecting on a so[1]called “Other,” but rather a projection towards the self. A self-reflection. A boomerang. That is to say, instead of looking for or deflecting one’s faults, fantasies, angst on some other, one could embody them and live them. It is about acknowledging and embodying the plethora of variables that make us be.

Dis-othering has to do with the realization or the putting in practice of what bell hooks calls the “The Oppositional Gaze” (1992), which is to say the possibility of interrogating the gaze of the “otherer,” but also the importance of looking back at and against the “otherer,” and looking at one another in that space of the “othered.”

Dis-othering must be a deeply non-capitalist, non-exploitative, and non-profit-oriented act, wherein the principle of “what goes around, comes around” reigns. This is to say that if geopolitical, geo-economic, and neo-liberal capitalist economic goals of “profit, come what may” are catalysts to acts and processes of othering, then dis-othering must entail a negation and exemption from relations based on such principles.

Dis-othering must mean getting out of the cul-de-sac of power relations as the basis of being in the world. Dis-othering is a call for explorations of the cosmic vastness of the imagination, of new futures, identities, ways of being, and ways of living together in the world, and of doing so not despite our differences, but because of the importance and richness of our differences. Dis-othering is a pledge for a reimagination, as much as a dismantling of cartographies of power, and a reinvention of geographies. Dis-othering is a recalibration of human and nonhuman, spacial and social relations independent of the given powers, but based on an interdependency of all animate and inanimate that cohabit this world.

Dis-othering is the practice of what Sara Ahmed calls the “feminist killjoy”[xii], which is to say the act of resisting the joy or taking part in the joy of laughing at or mocking or belittling or denigrating or othering someone. A refusal to accept the comfort of societal status quo in relation to misogyny, patriarchy, racism, classism, and genderism. Disothering will have to entail speaking up, pointing out, calling out inequalities, as much as proposing alternative ways of being in and perceiving a world of justice and justness.

DR. BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG (Cameroon, 1977) is an independent curator, author, and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017)  and is currently guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.