Jean Fisher, 'Witness for the Prosecution: the writings of Coco Fusco'
In: The Bodies that were not ours and other writings. By Coco Fusco. London and New York: Routledge in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001, pp. 223-230.
My first encounter with Coco Fusco's work concerned a particularly acerbic debate among the New York art (and feminist) intelligentsia prompted by her challenge to the legitimacy of a cinema program which lacked any curatorial or interpretative input from those participating practitioners designated as black and ethnic "others". Symptomatic of the more subtle, patronising face of institutionalised racism that was to cripple "multiculturalism", the New York event had failed to address its ideological limitations and assumptions of authority, attitudes no longer to be tolerated with silent resignation. [1] As I was to learn later, this was but one of several public confrontations over the years provoked by Fusco's incisive commentaries and live performances on the relations of power operating within the cultural and social spheres.
Fusco was among a generation of cultural theorists and practitioners then emerging from an expanded field of postcolonial critique, bringing with them new paradigms of cultural politics developing in cross-border zones and post-national global networks. As Fusco explains, " We didn't theorise postcoloniality after the fact, learn about it from a workshop, or wait for multiculturalism to become foundation lingo for 'appreciating diversity' - we lived it and struggle to make art about it." [2] But it is by no means the case that Fusco has deliberately set out to be confrontational. More to the point is that, in speaking from within a number of identificatory positions that reject or parodically manipulate the fixed stereotypical identities assigned as "other", she inevitably engages in a war of positions with hegemonic culture, transgressing those boundaries that it erects to keep the subaltern in her place and confirm its own authority, or, for that matter, the narrow protectionist lines drawn by an understandable but defensive black nationalism. The turbulence created by her work testifies to the extent to which the collective unconscious of the cultural field remains inscribed by a psychic investment originating in colonial relations. That this investment is articulated around the ambivalent movement of desire - a movement that abjects even as it longs for recognition of and by the other - is a condition that Fusco has turned to political effect, especially in the cultural fields of representation.
[...]
Coco Fusco's work overall stands as both an extension and a corrective of earlier postmodernist and postcolonial theory, where what is at stake is a concept of the subject as an effective agent of political engagement and resistance. Postcolonial theory, exemplified by the influential writings of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhaba, [5] made invaluable analyses of he signifying practices and psychosocial dynamics of neo-colonial relations. It was none the less criticized for its emphasis on the philosophical and literary methodologies of continental poststructuralist theory at the expense of a more interdisciplinary, socio-economic approach, or one that took account of the value of vernacular expressive cultures. [6] Perceived as largely addressing a somewhat hermetic and Anglophonic metropolitan academia, it made few references to earlier twentieth-century critiques of colonial dominance and Western regimes of knowledge from the black Atlantic which anticipated their own (with the notable exception of Bhabha's debt to Fanon's early psychoanalytic work) and made no reference whatsoever to Latin American scholarship and cultural practices, which had been debating problems of identity and hybridity at least since Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago of 1928. As Fusco pointed out, " dialectical patterns of assimilation and resistance" in New World subaltern cultural phenomena were "postmodernist avant la lettre". [7] The very heterogeneity of subaltern experiences risked being homogenized and transhistoricized by abstract theories that lacked grounding in the specificity of contemporary economic, political, and social realities, or recognition of complex subject formations of class and gender as well as race and ethnicity. Although these issues were recognised by Spivak, they were central to the critical agenda of such African American women theorists as bell hooks and Michelle Wallace. While some claims were made for the transformative role of the critic, notably by Said, [8] without speaking to real material conditions and in a language accessible to wider audiences it was difficult to argue how postcoloniality theory could inform a coherent politics of resistance and agency.
Fusco's contribution to these debates has been an impressive body of writing, distinct both in its attentiveness to the nuances of cultural context and in its wide range of modalities: the scholarly and the conversational, the pedagogical, the diaristic and the performance script. These are resonant with autobiographical detail, the terms experiential rather than abstract. But this is not to impute to her work the kind of "authenticity" that has plagued dominant culture's essentialist readings of "other" practices. There is nothing objective about Fusco's relationship to the text. Like the storyteller, the writer/performer becomes a participant in the narrative; both subject and object of the enunciation - a redoubling of identity constituted through an encounter with/as otherness, where boundaries between self and other are fluid and uncertain. Hence the text is not a statement of truth so much as a witness of truth's absence and as such opens a path toward it. [13]
Notes
[1] Fusco's arguments were later outlined in an essay, "Fantasies of Oppositionality: Reflections on Recent Conferences in Boston and New York, " Screen, no. 198, pp. 80-93.
[2] Fusco, introduction to English Is Broken Here: Notes in Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City: The New Press, 1995), p. X.
[5] Early key texts included Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) and The World, the Text, and the Critic [1983] (London: Faber and Faber, 1984); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, essays republished as, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York & London: Methuen, 1987); and Homi Bhabha, essays republished as The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
[6] For a balanced account of postcolonial theory and its critique, see Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1997).
[7] Fusco, "Fantasies of Oppositionality, " p. 82.
[8] Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 220.
[13] This is perhaps most clearly brought out in the commentary, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" (in English Is Broken Here, pp. 37-63), which reflects upon the experiences of Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, 1992, a performance in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, which satirizes the Euro-American history of the public display of non-white peoples as curiosities and spectacle and which was staged in numerous international locations.