Kobena Mercer, 'Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia', In: Mirage, Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. Edited by Ragnar Farr. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995, pp. 15-53.
Keith Piper' s 1983 painting, The Body Politic, depicts two bodies, one female and white, the other black and male, both denuded and beheaded on either side of two canvases joined by a pair of hinges. The two figures mime and mirror one another across the body of text which gives voice to mutual claims of misrecognition. 'To you I was always (just) a body...I was your best fantasy and your worst fear. Everything to you but human.' This early work (since lost or destroyed) can be read as embodying a matrix of concerns arising out of the visual arts sector of the postcolonial diaspora. Its depiction of doubling across the boundaries of sex and race, the chiasmus of difference that is inscribed as a relationship of both polarity and complementarity, draws attention to the 'danger zone' of psychic and social ambivalence as it is lived in the complexity and contradictions of multicultural society. The difficulty of articulating sexual and racial difference together, as sources of social division constantly thrusting identities apart, while simultaneously binding them intimately beneath the cliché that 'opposites attract,' pinpoints the key displacements brought about, over the past decade, by the hybrid interplay of postcolonial and postmodern paradigms in contemporary cultural politics.
But what strikes me as the most salient aspect of the diaspora aesthetics taking shape in such works as The Body Politic is the unique way in which the fear/fantasy formulation came to be echoed and disseminated across a whole range of critical developments, for it was precisely the psychoanalytic implications of the concept of ambivalence that were being theorised in Homi Bhabha's profoundly influential text, 'The Other Question,' which also entered public circulation in 1983. [2] Structured around a diacritical rereading of Touch of Evil, Orson Welles' film-noir classic which depicts the Mexico/US border as the narrative setting in which textual dynamics of fear and desire revolve around the mixed-race identity of its Chicano protagonist, the wealth of insights generated by Bhabha's critique can be seen to double back into the representation of inter-racial sexuality investigated in Pipers's art: both lead us into the ambiguous realm where different differences intersect.
[...]
The fear/fantasy formulation signalled a decisive shift with regard to the strategies of counter-discourse performed by black artists in film photography and fine art. Breaking through the impasse of outmoded negative/positive images dichotomy inherited from earlier phases in struggles for self-representation, it could be seen to punctuate what Stuart Hall prophetically called, 'the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.' [9] If what resulted was a moment of rupture asserting the hybridity and heterogeneity of diaspora subjects, the subsequent vicissitudes of 'black representation' serve to caution whatever celebratory tendencies remain in a new world (dis)order of unending uncertainty and interminable anxiety. Once we locate the transnational interventions of postcolonial artists within the global context that differentiates their critical relationship to the visual ecologies of race and representation in popular culture, we find that the social field of fear and fantasy is never finally fixed. The oppressive regimes of myth and stereotype that inform the political management of multicultural discontent are themselves fluid, mobile and highly unpredictable, constantly updating themselves in the service of the changing same. The heightened visibility of new images of 'otherness' - from ragga girls to gangsta rap to Benetton billboards and the spectacular demonstrations of O J Simpson - demands that our attention be drawn to what filmmaker Isaac Julian has called The Darker Side of Black (BBC, 1994). Issues of homophobia and misogyny have more than symptomatic meaning in current manifestations of black expressive culture: they concentrate the mind on what could be called the 'interior limits' of decolonisation.
[2] Homi Bhabha. 'The other question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse'. Screen vol. 24 no. 4, 1983; reprinted in altered form in Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1994.
[9] Stuart Hall. 'New Ethnicities.' in Black Film / British Cinema. ICA Documents 7, London, 1988.