Coco Fusco, 'Preface: Beyond Visibility: Thoughts on the Situation of postcolonial Culture'
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. XIII-XVII.
I have never heard any relative of mine speak of the time when our ancestors were owned by others, but the past wraps itself around the tales of our beginnings. It comes into view, albeit unnamed, in a story my mother would repeat to me when I was a little girl about her grandfather, the oldest relative she recalled from her childhood. She would describe his last days of life, when he would disappear behind a locked door to endure his fatal haemorrhaging away from the gaze of concerned kin. Then an impudent 10-year-old, she disobeyed his rules one day, slipped into his room and called to him. He emerged, perfectly erect and unflinching, with his grey hair pulled back in the ponytail that had given him the nickname of el Indio. He sat her on the bed and in the most stern of voices enjoined her to remember him for what he was about to tell her. "We are not just any blacks," he cried, waving his weathered index finger at her face. "We are libertos. Everyone in my family is a liberto. My mother bought her freedom and I have the documents to prove it!"
Within days of this encounter, my mother would tell me, my great-grandfather died. Neither she nor any other relative has ever mentioned possessing the document he spoke of, or even having seen it. So few of the things that connected them to their past made it into the bundles they carried from Cuba to the US that I did not think it odd as a child that my mother's words were the only guarantee I had of this story's truth. Years later, after I had begun to study the intricacies of Cuban slavery and the colonialist rationale for creating a class of free blacks on the island, the gaps in my mother's story filled my mind with questions. How had my great-great-grandmother managed to buy her freedom? What had she negotiated with her master? What power or special talent had she had to make him agree to accept her payment for her own person? Did she leave other members of our family behind? Why doesn't anyone ever speak of them?
I doubt that my family knows the answers to these questions. They have nothing to do with the point of my mother's story, which is about our supposed exceptionalness as descendants of an enslaved black woman who freed herself, rather than waiting for a war or an edict to emancipate her. Of course, such myths rely on notions of caste that I know very well to be heinous. Though designed to defend us against the dehumanizing objectification that lies at the core of racism by providing an invisible distinction which would make us see ourselves as "other than the other," they are disheartening examples of how we internalized the racist logic against which we claimed to fight. Knowing this, however, does not prevent me from being moved by the story as a profound gesture of maternal love. It arose from a mother's wish to impart a sense of self to the fruits of her body, and that desire only became a real possibility for a black woman at the moment of her reclaiming her own.
Now it might seem uncharacteristic, oddly romantic, or simply out of fashion for me to muse over the past in general or to resort to family histories in particular. Since the backlash against 1980s identity-based art exploded in the early 1990s, the art world has grown increasingly hostile to the deployment of personal experience as aesthetic or political gesture. And in the 1980s, when multiculturalism enjoyed a brief period of positive attention and autobiographical confessions were the order of the day, I remember voicing a good deal of scepticism about "the emotional striptease" that white audiences so often demanded. So why would I turn to this childhood memory now?
I do so because that story represents my personal link to a very political history of colonialism, and that history has shaped a very specific relationship between mind and body for colonized and enslaved peoples and their descendants. That relationship is not in synch with the euphemistic characterizations of disembodiment that dominate the present moment. As cultural theorist Hortense Spillers so eloquently points out, the annihilation of family structure, the mutilation, and the severing of the body from will are real traumas at the root of black experience in the New World. In that sense, the psychic formation of subaltern subjectivity differs from the Freudian Oedipal model, which relies on an actual family unit and is predicated on the idea that transgressive incestuous desire structures the unconscious and organizes bodily experience without having to have been realized. Because the difference that marks the subaltern subject first made itself present to me through my mother's look and voice, my connection to it is as emotional as it is cerebral. It is historical memory that I live as both a psychic and a bodily experience. Perhaps that duality drives my desire to explore its repercussions intellectually through writing and physically through performance. The work in this volume comprises my exploration of what that history means, both for myself and for the other artists who in one way or another share this legacy.
My interest in the past however, is shaped by the exigencies of the present. I produced the works in this volume between 1995 and 2000, while sweeping changes in the approach to otherness were taking place in the visual and performing arts. Globalization has transformed both the art world and the management of racial and cultural difference, which now follows the model of the new corporate internationalism. As Kobena Mercer has so brilliantly noted, difference is everywhere, so the antiracist struggles of previous decades that were organized around achieving visibility don't seem calibrated with the present. At the same time, symbolic visibility in the age of globalization is no guarantee of political power. Privatization has eroded the basis upon which artists once could make demands for a more democratic culture. Museums and proliferating biennials have normalized diversity while demanding that its criticality be eviscerated in exchange for acceptance.
The backlash against socially engaged art practice has spread from the popular media and the far right into everyday life and art scholarship. The political demands for inclusion and institutional critique that characterized subaltern art practice of earlier periods are regularly described by critics as a prior evolutionary stage, implying that truly human art needs to surpass such (Neanderthal) concerns. It is as if we are being encouraged to believe that institutional racism never existed, as if art history had never been Eurocentric, as if the current wave of "multicultural normalization" had always already been in place. To focus on the imbalances of power and institutionalized racism has been deemed anathema to beauty, championed once again as the essence of art. Cultural production that addresses the ways that the colonial legacy of racism shapes arts institutions, arts reception, and art scholarship has been lumped together with the tales of woe confessed on television talk-shows - making it a variation of the populist effluvia that interfere with the "'great work" of modernism. Postcolonially identified artists know very well what to avoid and take a strategic approach as to how they present themselves in such a climate in order to survive and thrive. But some of them keep trying to go against the grain, to unleash the demons that others try vehemently to hide. Those are the people I like to write about the most.
While postcolonial artists are usually blamed for reproducing stereotypical notions of the primitive and the exotic, I would argue that most neo-conservative critics fail to recognize several key points. First, bureaucratic multiculturalism which does propagate such paradigms is not the same as, nor is it the culmination of, the range of postcolonial aesthetic practices that have intersected with and interrogated modernism for decades, long before governments, foundations, and curators turned their attention to such issues. The mainstream artworld is currently focused on globalizing modernism so postcolonial art that engages with those visual strategies, thus diminishing visible difference, is celebrated as "transcending" primitivism and facile ethnography. However, each moment in mainstream art development demands it own "other" - at other times it has been neo-expressionist, heroically political, or parodically performative. Second, global cultural consumerism and white desire play a far larger and determinant role in maintaining primitivist paradigms in place than any misidentification with such stereotypes by subaltern artists themselves. In fact, the pervasive use of irony and parody in the engagement with notions of the primitive in contemporary postcolonial art is a sign of how artists relegated to the place of the other respond by problematizing the naturalness of that category. Finally, aesthetic engagement with historical trauma of colonialism and slavery is simply not comparable with the insipid narcissism of talk-show confessionals. The refusal to forget that history and the insistence on returning to it in order to perceive the parallels between old and new forms of dehumanization are globalization's undertow, the postcolonial's strategic means of debunking the triumphalist narratives of modernism and postmodernism.
The many-headed monster that the backlash against identity politics has become has gained ground at the same time that a rather euphemistic discourse about a post-human era has emerged as the favoured lingo of the new cyber-culture. I would be the first to admit that the new possibilities of communication engendered by digital technologies call for new interpretive vocabularies and that advances in medicine are forcing us to rethink ideas about the integrity of the human organism as the basis of identity. At the same time, I am extremely wary of the ways that the celebratory views of the virtual domain elide pressing political questions about the toll that globalization exacts upon the millions of displaced, disenfranchised, and brutally exploited people. The digital divide is not just about the access to computers and phone lines - it is about how subaltern bodies are positioned vis-à-vis technology. Colonialism abjected the subaltern body through militarism, forced labor, and scientific objectification - new technologies elaborate and diversify these strategies of domination. The fact that a few people in developing countries can access the internet and thus imagine their own transcendence of the uneven modernities in which they live does not wipe out that overarching reality. When I stand before the headlines of hyper-hip magazines about new technologically driven culture that promise to deliver the "future" of art, music, cinema, or what have you, I am pained by the awareness that this stress on a time not yet ours hides the present in all its tragic dimensions.
The "others" on the have-not side of the digital divide in this troubled present endure the first period of mass misery in human history that is generated by greed rather than scarcity. In response to this splitting of the world, I have tried in this volume to address what I call the interplay between the desire to disengage minds from bodies and the actuality of technologies that objectify bodies and bodily activity, thus disengaging them from minds. I was deeply troubled by the artworld's and cyberculture's indifference to the underside of globalization in the mid-1990s. However, the new alliances forming around the world among protest movements against neoliberalism and the possibilities of electronic civil disobedience that have emerged in the past three years have renewed my hope that cultural practices with a life sustaining purpose can and will continue to develop no matter how far to the right the political and art critical pendulum swings.