Risky Business: Imagining Cultures of Conviviality

Risky Business: Imagining Cultures of Conviviality

Thesereflections were composed during a raw New England winter’s immersion in Paul Gilroy’s recent book, Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), published simultaneously in the UK as After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, an important treatise that seeks, among other things, to help us think through our current theoretical muddle over the meanings--really, the potential--of “multiculturalism” as an enabling source of creative expression. As a way out of the dis-abling after-effects of “multiculturalism” (why this once culturally--and politically--inspiriting term has now become problematic,indeed bankrupt, requires a separate essay), Gilroy proposes the idea of “convivial” culture, by which he means modes of expression marked by the “unruly,” the “chaotic,” the “antic”;by forms of literature, art and (above all) popular culture capable of generating “emancipatory interruptions,” which he associates, in a striking phrase, with the “feral beauty of postcolonial culture.”

The conditions for what might be calledthe socialpromise of “conviviality,” however, remain somewhat obscure. At their deepest level, conviviality’s conditions of possibility seem rooted in the psychological;that is, in the implied therapeutic office of the“convivial” to address the collective “melancholia” that, in Gilroy’s analysis, currently afflicts Britain in the wake of its still repressed history (memory) of imperialism.

In Gilroy’s deep diagnosis, white Britain is struggling today with the legacy of various migrations and the profound impact of the second immigrant generationof “native” citizens who have, in effect, unsettled the nation, displacing, in the process, traditional sites of national identity (ie., definitions of “Englishness,” as seen in the constantly worried tones of the British press, for example David Blunkett’s mania over identity cards, revealing desire to impose a “mythical Britishness,” etc.). As a symptom of this invasive “multicultural” process Gilroy identifies a national pathology, what he unflinchingly called, in an earlier version of this argument, “the morbid core of England and Englishness in remorseless decline.” With the necessary therapeutic lifting of Britain’s repressed memories of colonialism and racism, followed by a risk-filledbut potentially soul-transforming exposure to “radical openness” (“exposure to otherness is always going to be risky,” Gilroy declares, speaking rude truths in the desire to forge a working alliance with his afflicted but, hopefully risk-taking reader-patients), Postcolonial Melancholia promises a way out of our current social-cultural crisis. Thus our potential salvation may be located, in Gilroy’s implied utopian vision,along a vibrant road whose redemptive horizon looks forward tocities teeming (grooving?--see his “One Nation Under a Groove” in Small Acts) with the “chaotic pleasures of the convivial postcolonial urban world.” I, for one, would like to check out such a pleasure dome.

What would such a convivial culture look like? Sound like? Let’s watch a telling scene from My Son the Fanatic (1997), [now labeled the first “7/7” film] Udayan Prasad’s film version of Hanif Kureishi’s story about a second-generation son’s awakened embrace of religious radicalism and his immigrant cabdriver father’s struggle to fathom, let alone accept such an apocalyptic transformation. Parvez the father (played by the brilliant Om Puri) remains bewildered: Why can’t Farid appreciate all the new world possibilities that (literally) absorb, shape the father’s deepest self? Parvez, for those who haven’t seen this powerful film, draws sustenance from American blues and jazz; from imbibing hard liquor; above all from dreaming about his son’s future as student, model, model citizen, married to the local Chief of Police’s daughter.

Farid: Can you put keema with strawberries?

Parvez: Everything is mingling already together, thing and the other!

Farid: Some of us are wanting something more besides muddle.

Parvez: What?

Farid: Belief, purity, belonging to the past. I won’t bring up my children in this country.

As the opening scenes of My Son the Fanatic make clear, Farid is shamed into his “faith identity” by watching his father’s buffoon-like, unconscious behavior before the racist gaze of the white world (as represented by the son’s would-be white in-laws, discomfited by their daughter’s desire of a mixed marriage). [A key aside: In this respect, Farid’s mode of identity politics appears structured by resentment, a textbook case of what the political philosopher Wendy Brown calls “wounded attachments,” the vulnerable space where “politicized identity, premised on exclusion and fueled by humiliation and suffering” recoils in rage and righteousness. We should also note that in Brown’s view identity structured by such resentment “becomes deeply invested in its own impotence.”]

Parvez may be unconscious of the shaming presence he enacts in his son’s eyes, but he is ultimately “saved” in Kureishi’s by his risk-taking embrace of the unsettling/unstable condition of cultural “mingling.” Indeed, Parvez’s mode of identity politics involves an ardent belief in the spiritually enabling (convivial?)powers of the contemporary British Asian “muddle.” “How else can we belong here,” he cautions his son, “except by mixing up all together.” In the end, Parvez is imaged in an empty house, drinking whiskey and listening to Percy Mayfield singing “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” [PLAY SCENES IF THERE’S TIME] His son has reviled him as a “dirty man”; his wife has left him for the “old world” of Pakistan; the woman he loves and who loves him offers only a naïve dream of escape. [In a key exchange Bettina confesses to Parvez, “I’m not used to being looked at with curiosity.” In Kureishi’s world, “curiosity” carries redemptive potential, a position of risk-taking empathy, as opposed to “all ideologies, cultural or religious” which elsewhere Kureishi dismisses as “props in the identity game.”] [Thirteen years ago Gilroy anticipated Kureishi in the Introduction to Small Acts: “The resort to ethnic absolutism can only be a source of weakness in the long run. It is already a source of inertia and confusion.”]

Shifting location, from the UK to Europe, to my American ears I hear similartroubled overtones, worried voices registering shudders of shock and despair, in the intramural conversations of those societies currently consumed by debates over “integration” (what sociologists of immigration in the States term “assimilation”) and, in the case of Germany, the matter of leitkultur (translated as the “dominant” culture). Not surprisingly, that debate is being played out in the realm of popular culture. I’m no authority on contemporary German or Dutch cinema, but from what I read, European filmmakers, like British Asian and variousAmerican artists representing a range of ethnicities, are similarly absorbed by the comedy of immigrant generations: for example, Albert ter Heedt’s wickedly satirical, deadly serious take on contemporary Dutch-Moroccan family life,Shouf Shouf Habibi(thanks to my friend Ruud Janssens for sending me a bootlegged copy); or, Fatih Akin’s Head-On, which offers, according to the reviewer in salon.com, a “subtle exploration of displacement and longing” in its powerful portrait of German-Turkish lovers’s struggle to locate themselves under the pressure ofleitkultur and the claims of tradition. “I wanted to tell a rough and crazy love story between borderline people,” Akin has explained [note that one of Kureishi’s early plays is titled Borderlines]; [note: Akin’s first feature, translated as Short, Sharp Shock, was a Scorcese-inspired multicultural gangster movie about the mean streets of Hamburg; even more suggestively, in his newest work, a documentary about his home city of Istanbul called “Crossing the Bridge,” Akin seizes on his dual allegiances, the geographically hybrid [am I still permitted to use this word?] aspect of his identity as second-generation (by birth) German and Turk. “It’s funny to identify yourself with a city, but Istanbul is half in Europe and half in Asia, connected by a bridge, and I am this mixed kid too, half Germany, half Turkey.”

In this respect, the German-Turkish artist, straddling the territorial borderline, would appear exemplary of Gilroy’s “convivial” urban culture. Again, not surprisingly, Akin is not alone in such territorial fluidity. Listen to Canan, 29 years old, about his spatially-determined site of identity politics: “No, no, no, I am not German. I would say that I am from Berlin. That’s not the same. I am really into the city. . . . I am not Turkish and not German. . . .My friends are not Germans, though they have German passports. They are mixed-up, multicultural. And this is the future for me, I live in it. That’s the best you can do cause it’s only going to get more mixed up. The future is multicultural of course. And that makes me feel really good. This city makes me feel really good.”

“’Multiculturalism has failed, big time,’” Angela Merkel, the new German head of state, asserts, voicing, it turns out,the judgment of both the Left and the Right on the failed legacy of this troubled ideal in Europe. By contrast, Mustafa Yolda, the Vice Chairman of the Islamic Association of North Germany explained to the Times reporter Richard Bernstein, “’In America immigrants are proud to be immigrants, but in Germany we are being endured.’”

It would, of course, require a separate essay to explain why “multiculturalism” has received such bad press of late. Perhaps the toughest analysis has been the stringent critique launched by the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu about the imperial dimension of American academic multiculturalism itself. For Bourdieu, writing with Loic Wacquant, “North American ‘multiculturalism’ is neither a concept nor a theory, nor a social or political movement--even though it claims to be all those things at the same time. It is a screen discourse [ouch!]. . . .It is also a North American discourse, even though it thinks of itself and presents itself as a universal discourse, to the extent that it expresses the contradictions specific to the predicament of US academics. Cut off from the public sphere and subjected to a high degree of competitive differentiation in their professional milieu, US professors have nowhere to invest their political libido but in campus squabbles dressed up as conceptual battles royal.” [original emphasis; ouch encore!]

In light of such stingingrebuke, is it any wonder that cultural theorists are afflicted by what Wendy Brown, in another striking insight, terms “left melancholia,” a depressed state of political-theoretical imagination now haunting various zones of progressive consciousness? What happened to the dream of coalition building and collective resistance? of social renovation and universal justice promised by the so-called“multicultural” project?

The short answer involves the socially-fissive trajectory of identity politics and multiculturalism, their inability to create conditions of solidarity; in bitter response, we are now witnessing ashared backlash across the political spectrum, first (and unsparingly) years ago from the Right (Schlesinger and D’Souza) and now (and for some, perhaps surprisingly) from the Left (Alain Finkielkraut in Paris, Paul Scheffer [in the much-quoted “The Multicultural Tragedy”] in Amsterdam,Philip Roth in The Human Stain in the States) to the rupturing/exhaustion around the effort to imagine a truly pluralist society and the coercive “scripts” imposed by identity politics. Ultimately, for major cultural theorists like Bourdieu, Jameson, and Zizek, multiculturalism it just another code for American academic imperialism, a screen discourse masking yet another global takeover. In this analysis multiculturalism and globalizationwork hand in hand, insidiously. [Question: What would the strong answer to these stinging charges look like?]

Postcolonial Melancholia, in this respect, attempts to resolve this social-theoretical impasse--the angst of the liberal public intellectuals; the melancholia, across disciplines, of disillusioned radical theorists; the harsh rejection by a culture-hero like Bourdieu--through theenabling vision ofcultures ofconviviality. The source of his ebullient, breath-taking optimism, as against the hardened face of“faith identities” and the murderous rage dislodged by an aesthetic of sacrilege(I allude here to the no holds barred provocateur, the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, murdered in early November 2004on the famously open streets of Amsterdam for his sacrilegious imprinting of holy Koranic script on the back of a naked woman) resides in the possibilities of popular culture as a site cultural repair, of a potentially joined-up politics.

Crucially, for Gilroy, popular culture “turn[s] the tables on all purity seekers, whoever they may be”; it “force[s] them to account for their phobia about otherness and their violent hostility in the face of the clanging, self-evident sameness of suffering humankind.”[”The fantasy of purity is appalling,” an enraged Philip Roth writes in The Human Stain; “Never for (Coleman Silk) the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical moral we.”] These are very large claims; and I’m not completely convinced that Gilroy’s model of such a subversive table-turner (really ethnic shape-shifter), the figure of “Ali G,” convincingly makes his point. So let’s watch Ali G turn the tables on that scary celebrity talking head from the Far Right, Patrick Buchanan, interviewed by the schlemiel from Staines, about the question of religion and the evidence of “BLT’s” in Irag. [For those who need to know, “BLT” is short hand for a “bacon, lettuce, and tomato” sandwich.] PLAY SCENE

For Gilroy, the brilliance of Sacha Baron Cohen’s (a nice Jewish boy from Hampstead who wrote his thesis on the Jewish-Black alliance during the Civil Rights era while studying history at Cambridge) performance resides in his “wise foolishness,” in his “carnivalesque contempt for the pompous and powerful” he “ambushes” during his mock interviews. For me, the exchange with Buchanan enacts a hilarious revenge on a notorious anti-Semite. Wearing a “Tommy Hilfiger” doo-rag/cum yarmulke, “Ali’s” slight (astonished?) smile momentarily lifts the veil; even he can’t believe the self-convicting statementabout The Passion of the Christhe’s elicited from his all too-willing victim. As for fighting a war over a popular sandwich, Buchanan’s apparently unconscious slippage, exchanging WMDs for “BLTs,” chillingly exposes the farce embedded in the arbitrary acronym, thus subverting the authorizingpowers that be. [Clearly, Buchanan cares far more about simply being on television than on listening to the purposeful inanity of his interlocutor.]

When Ali G enjoins us, in his ritual refrain, to “keep it real,” his brilliantly ironic invitation highlights the richly encoded, indeedconstructed dimension of his composite character (a white kid from Staines, self-assembled, with a vaguely Black or Asian accent, modeling American rappers’ styles and gestures), whose cultural office is to deconstruct, demystify power (along with white mores and homophobia and anti-Semitism, among the zones of American culture, 1960s style,he puts on) through the willing cooperation of his willfully un-ironic subjects. To what “community” does “Ali G” belong? I suppose to the fluid tribe of ethnic shape shifters, crossing lines of racial and ethnic boundaries in a postmodern (postcolonial?) performance of unmasking hybridity. In thisrespect[n.b. Ali’s other key refrain, “respect”--also sent up by ter Heedt in the person of one of the hapless schlemihl scammers in Shouf Shouf],Ali G appears to be a member of Gilroy’s honored tribe of conviviality.

In closing, I would add one more member to the convivial tribe, the linguistically fluid figure of John Leguizamo. In his brilliant performance pieceFreak, about coming of age in JacksonHeights, Queens--an authentically “multicultural” territory where various “ethnic enclaves” enlarge/extend the (merely) local “pleasures of clustering”--we enter the global-aural landscape ofQueens. Let’s listen to Leguizamo’s astonishing verbal collage, a verbal enacting of the linguistic Babel that is his old neighborhood.

PLAY SCENE

“The many-voiced will always be a threat to the single-voiced,” observes Howard Jacobson, the sometimes prickly Independent columnist. He’s responding to the limits of expression imposed by those representatives of “faith identities” who, lacking the capacity of irony, tend-- sometimes with murderous outcomes--to have no sense of humor. Leguizamo’s ventriloquist/convivial art, I would argue, issues from a space of empathy, from long residence in an “heterophilic” territory (I borrow this striking term from the transplanted sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in an essay titled “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers”), from an openness (in this case) to loquacity, an attentiveness to other voices from the ‘hood. Out of such linguistic transformations the dream of convivial culture can, perhaps, be born.

In the end, however, to achieve conditions of enabling conviviality we must confront--and I mean confront--a deep and unsettling, indeed risky paradox. According to Gilroy, to enter this radically altered “multicultural” landscape of the convivial we must relinquish “every notion of culture as property” and thus re-orient ourselves under the sign of a world “broken and dispersed by the swirling, vertiginous motion of the postcolonial world.” Such an upheaval, it would seem, always haunts the “dispersed” soul, terrified by its unmooring, made dizzy by freedom, what Roth brilliantly calls “the singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding.”