Gilane Tawadros, 'The Case of the Missing Body:
A Cultural Mystery in Several Parts
In: Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. Edited by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 105-112.
The value of the term diaspora and its symbolic character, after all, resides precisely in the fact that its dispenses not only with the universalising and transcendental claims of the 'grand narratives' of western culture, but equally with the notion of a 'pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an unsullied originary moment'. The implications of this for critical writing which addresses itself to the cultural production of artists in the diaspora and artists from different cultures are that it must articulate the ways in which these artists displace and contest those grand narratives without, in the process, reinventing an alternative, totalising 'grand narrative' which is equally fixed and exclusive.
Then there is the problem of what it actually means to 'become centred'. Does it mean that these ideas, images and objects have quite literally entered the central frame of western representation and systems of knowledge? Or does it mean that, within the logic of late twentieth century western discourse, all positions of difference have become subsumed under what Nelly Richard has described as a 'new economy of sameness' which continues to be administered from the centre? Or perhaps, the politics of difference has indeed become centred in our visual culture and, in the process, has effected its own closure, a sort of discursive full stop which we have written into our own argument with western historiography?
For now let us assume, as Stuart Hall maintains, that every full stop is provisional and that what we are engaged in represents what he calls 'unfinished closure'. The fact remains that we are all acutely aware that these artistic practices and critical debates can only take place within the parameters of mainstream western cultural politics but, to the same extent, we are aware that they cannot be delimited or prescribed by established aesthetic practices or hegemonic discourses.
This leads me to the fundamental question of language, and by language I mean here both the terminology we use and the ends to which we use a given set of terms. We have, in recent years, become accustomed to using a kind of critical shorthand which has led us to talk about the 'centre'; we talk about 'blackness' in antithesis to 'whiteness'. We do this at the same time as we reject the dichotomies and binarisms which inform western culture. In the process, we risk falling headlong into what is perhaps the greatest pitfall of all, that of constructing from the politics of difference yet another unassailable fortress which will be absorbed into the canon of western art and art history.
I want to end without any resolution to these problems or even tentative answers just some provisional thoughts.
[...]
If we really mean to refute fixed positions and absolute categories in our thinking, if we are really serious about giving up the search for a complete, all-embracing answer, then we have to take on board the dynamic of change ( as distinct from progress or evolution) as an intrinsic part of our critical armour, accepting that what we say at this particular point in time and from this particular place is provisional - not fixed, unalterable or exclusive. And, most importantly, that this dynamic of change takes place within the frame of representation. In other words, that it is the work of art itself and its aesthetic, cultural and epistemological frame which should mould our critical language.