alien-own/own-alien: globalization and cultural difference

8/18/2019 Alien-Own/Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference

1/11

Alien-Own/Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference

Gerardo Mosquera

1

There is a general concern that globalization will impose homoge-

nized, cosmopolitan cultural patterns built on Eurocentric foundations,

which inevitably flatten, reify, and manipulate cultural differences. This fear

has serious grounds. There is no doubt that the transnational expansion of

our age requires languages, institutions, and international functions in order

to make possible communication on a global scale.

Globalization is possible only in a world that has been previously

reorganized by colonialism. What is feared most is a planetary radicaliza-

tion toward a homogenized international culture, launched from the United

States. Standing out is the powerful diffusion of North American pop culture,

whose inventiveness, dynamism, and networks of circulation and marketing

have spread its influence throughout the world. Already at the end of the

thirties, Clement Greenberg was saying that kitsch was the first universal

culture.1 The consolidation of English as the language of international com-

1. Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’’ (1939), in his Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 12.

boundary 2 29:3, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

167

of

265

boundary 2

Published by Duke University Press


2/11

164 boundary 2 / Fall 2002

munication on a global scale is causing great concern. Today, even dogs are

trained in English, and it is said that they understand this language betterthan any other.

It isn’t simply a matter of language, communication, and mass cul-

ture. These processes are also woven into ‘‘high’’ culture. When the fine arts

are discussed in very general terms, people tend to use the terms international artistic language or contemporary artistic language as abstractconstructions that derive from the type of art-crit English in which today’s

‘‘international’’ discourses are spoken.2 Both terms are highly problematic.

Frequently, being ‘‘international’’ or ‘‘contemporary’’ in art is nothing but the

echo of being exhibited in elite spaces on the small island of Manhattan.

By the thirties, a sort of language of modernism had been forged, the

result of a paradoxical assemblage of the various ruptures produced by the

historical vanguards. A stock of resources had been established, drawing

from various tendencies that artists were using, combining, or transforming

at will. The explosion of pop, performance, minimalism, conceptualism, and

other orientations that were later called ‘‘postmodern’’ produced another

rupture. But by the nineties, a sort of ‘‘postmodern international language’’

was instituted, prevailing over the so-called international scene even while

its coinage as a dominant code denied de facto the pluralist perspective of

postmodernity.

The extreme case is the figure of the international installation artist,

a global nomad who roams from one international exhibit to another, his or

her suitcase packed with the elements for a future work of art or the tools

to produce it in situ. This figure, an allegory of the processes of globaliza-

tion, represents a key rupture with the figure of the artist-craftsman linked to

a studio in which the work of art is produced. Now the artists export them-

selves. Their work is closer to that of the manager or engineer who travels

constantly to attend to specific projects and businesses. The studio, that

ancestral, Vulcanian site linked with the artist, has become more a labora-

tory for projects and design than for production. Thus the physical link of

demiurge–studio–work of art, which associated each of the three elements

within a specific space and, furthermore, with a place and its genius, is bro-

ken. This type of artwork and methodology has a genetic relationship to the

international postminimalist-postconceptualist language. With them, a kind

of circulation based on biennials, thematic shows, and other forms of col-

lective global exhibits is facilitated.

2. See Gerardo Mosquera, ‘‘¿Lenguaje internacional?’’ Lápiz (Madrid) 121 (April 1986):12–15.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

168

of

265

boundary 2



3/11

Mosquera / Globalization and Cultural Difference 165

The exclusivist and teleological legitimization of the ‘‘international

language’’ of art acts as a mechanism of exclusion toward other languagesand discourses. In many art institutions—as among many art specialists

and collectors—prejudices based on a sort of axiological monism prevail.

In a catch-22, this circle tends to regard with suspicions of illegitimacy art

from the peripheries that endeavors to speak the ‘‘international language.’’

When it speaks properly, it is usually accused of being derivative; when

it speaks with an accent, it is disqualified for its lack of propriety toward

the canon.

Frequently, works of art are not looked at—they are asked to present

their passports, which tend not to be in order, for these works depend on

processes of hybridization, appropriation, re-signification, neologism, and

invention as a response to today’s world. This art is asked to present an

originality related to traditional cultures—which is to say, oriented toward the

past—or to show an abstract, pure originality toward the present. In both

cases, such art is required to state its context rather than to participate in a

general artistic practice that at times only refers to art itself.

The appropriation of modernism by the peripheries turns out to be

interesting within this order of things. This appropriation signifies an active

construction of modernism itself, diversifying its language, meaning, and

aims. But we don’t usually tend to consider a global modernism that reacts

to different contextual situations. Thus, José Clemente Orozco is always

discussed within Mexican muralism, never as one of the great artists of

expressionism. In this subtraction of interpretation, the positions of the cen-

tral powers, which confine difference to the ghetto, coincide strangely with

nationalism, which encloses difference behind a wall.

Globalization, the postmodern opening, and the pressure of multicul-

turalism have moved us toward a greater pluralism. But in general, and

above all in elite circles, globalization has responded less to a new con-

sciousness than to a tolerance based on paternalism, quotas, and political correctness .

The new attraction toward otherness has allowed for a greater circu-

lation and legitimation of art from the peripheries, above all as channeled

through specific circuits. But too frequently value has been placed on art

that explicitly manifests difference or that better satisfies the expectations

of otherness held by neoexoticism. This attitude has stimulated the self-

othering of some artists who, consciously or unconsciously, have tendedtoward a paradoxical self-exoticism.The case of ‘‘international language’’ in art reveals a hegemonic con-

struct of globalism more than a true globalization, which is understood as

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

169

of

265

boundary 2



4/11


generalized participation. Today we have both exclusive mainstream circuits

and hegemonic alternative ones, with their own mainstream and antimain-stream establishments, the latter being also exclusive, although broader

than their counterparts. Both legitimate their own field, and actively interact.

Dominant major and minor circuits of museums, galleries, and publications

(what we might call the ‘‘universalizers’’) construct the ‘‘world art scene,’’

even without intending to. This system claims to legitimize specific practices

without conceiving international or contemporary culture as a plural game

board of multiple and relative interactions.

The rhetoric regarding globalization has abounded in the illusory tri-

umph of a transterritorial world, one that is decentralized, omniparticipatory,

engaged in multicultural dialogues, with currents flowing in all directions. In

reality, globalization is not as global as it appears. Or, to paraphrase Orwell,

it is far more global for some than for others—the majority. Even the Inter-

net, the paradigm of free universal and individual communication, connects

only a small percentage of the world’s population. The speed of the avenues

of optic fibers and satellites makes us forget the congested avenues of the

megalopolis and the flight corridors, or the critical lack of avenues and high-

ways in a large part of the world. Cyberspace may be a virtual paradise, a

designer drug for escaping the global cybermess.

It should be obvious that globalization does not consist of an effec-

tive interconnection of the whole planet by means of an interwoven grid of

communication and exchange. Rather, it is a radial system, extending from

diverse centers of power of varying sizes into multiple and highly diversi-

fied economic zones. Such a structure implies the existence of large zones

of silence, barely connected to one another or only indirectly, via the neo-

metropolises. This axial structure of globalization and regions of silence

constitute the economic, political, and cultural networks of the planet, moti-

vating intense migratory movements in search of connection.

There has been little progress in South-South relations, other than

shared economic recessions. Globalization has certainly improved commu-

nications to an extraordinary extent, has dynamized and pluralized cultural

circulation, and has provided a more pluralist consciousness. Yet it has done

so by following the very channels delineated by the economy, thus repro-

ducing in good measure the existing structures of power.

The lack of South-South horizontal interaction is a colonial legacy

barely modified. This situation compels the peripheries to undertakestronger efforts to establish and develop horizontal circuits that act as cul-

tural life spaces. Such circuits will contribute to pluralizing culture, interna-

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

170

of

265

boundary 2



5/11


tionalizing it in the real sense, legitimizing it in their own terms, constructing

new epistemes, unfolding alternative actions.On the other hand, pluralism can be a prison without walls. Jorge Luis

Borges once told the story about the best labyrinth: the desert’s incommen-

surable openness, from where it is difficult to escape. Abstract or controlled

pluralism, as we see in some ‘‘global’’ shows, can weave a labyrinth of inde-

termination confining the possibilities of real, active diversity.

We are living a postutopian epoch of reformism that seeks change

within what exists, instead of changer la vie . But many transformations aretaking place in silence. Some come out of a Lampedusan strategy of power

establishments, aimed to change so that everything remains the same.

Power today strives not to confront diversity but to control it. However, muta-

tions also correspond to the international activity of new social and cultural

subjects, postcolonial processes, massive urbanization in Africa, Asia, and

Latin America, with its cultural and social implications, extensive migrations

all over the world, with their cultural displacements and heterogenization,

and other processes from ‘‘the bottom up.’’

To affirm cultural identity in tradition, understood in a sense of ‘‘purity,’’

is a colonial heritage. It has led to disastrous cults of ‘‘authenticity,’’ ‘‘roots,’’

and ‘‘origins,’’ above allin the years after decolonization, when the new coun-

tries attempted to affirm their identities and interests against the metropo-

lises and their imposed Westernization. Now the tendency is to see iden-

tity performatively, according to how each subject makes contemporaneity.Wole Soyinka once said that a tiger doesn’t proclaim its tigerness: it springs.

Candice Breitz has said, with regard to the realm of traditional cul-

ture in South Africa, ‘‘Social change can lead to the imbalance of certain

African ‘traditions’ but inevitably new and dynamic forms will emerge in their

place. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that these traditions must or ought

to develop along the same lines by which the West has defined its own

progress.’’3

Paradoxically, the global world is becoming the world of difference.

Globalization’s aims of conversion and domination also imply more gener-

alized access. If globalization seeks to convert the ‘‘Other,’’ its availability

also facilitates its use for the ‘‘Other’s’’ own, different ends, transforming the

international metaculture from within. If that metaculture retains its hege-

monic character, the subaltern cultures are taking advantage of the meta-

culture’s broadcasting capability to transcend local frameworks. Used from3. Candice Breitz, ‘‘Why African Avant-Garde Artists Have Never Existed,’’ Atlántica (LasPalmas de Gran Canaria) 11 (fall 1995): 60.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

171

of

265

boundary 2



6/11


the other side, cultural globalization has allowed the dissemination of mul-

tiple perspectives and has itself undergone adjustments in line with theseperspectives.

Furthermore, every process of homogenization on a large scale—

even when it succeeds in smoothing out differences—generates other, new

differences within itself, like Latin shattering into the Romance languages.

This is evident in the heterogeneity that immigrants are producing in the

megalopolises.

A truly global diffusion and evaluation of culture is possible only

through a multidirectional web of interactions. We need to organize South-

South and South-North circuits able to pluralize what we understand by

‘‘international art,’’ ‘‘international art language,’’ and the ‘‘international art

scene,’’ or even what is ‘‘contemporary.’’ Equally important is the construc-

tion of international and contemporary art and culture in a true international

way: in differences and from differences. That is, enacting difference ratherthan representing it, thus actively fashioning ‘‘international art language’’ in

multiple ways.

The fact that artists from every corner of the world, including Cuba,

now exhibit internationally reflects only a quantitative internationalization,

but numbers are not the issue. The question again is whether we are con-

tributing or not to the transformation of a hegemonic and restrictive situation

into active plurality, instead of being digested by that situation.

It is necessary to cut the global pie not only with a variety of knives but

also with a variety of hands, and then to share it accordingly. This is neither

revolution nor political correctness: It is a need for all if we don’t want an

endogamic culture. The key point is who makes the cultural decision, and

in whose benefit is it taken.4

2

In ‘‘Musique Nègre’’ (1931), the Haitian poet Léon Laleau laments his

sense of alienation in trying to express in French—the language and culture

in which he had been educated—his African roots:

4. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, ‘‘Lo propio y lo ajeno: Una aproximación al problemadel control

cultural,’’ in La cultura popular , ed. Adolfo Colombres (Mexico City: Premia, 1987), 79–86;and ‘‘La teoría del control cultural en el estudio de procesos étnicos,’’ Anuario Antropo-

lógico (University of Brasilia), no. 86 (1988): 13–53. See also Ticio Escobar, ‘‘Issues inPopular Art,’’ in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America , ed.Gerardo Mosquera (London: Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge: MIT Press,

1995), 91–113.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

172

of

265

boundary 2



7/11


And this hopelessness has no equal

To tame, with the words from FranceThis heart, which has come to me from Senegal?

Et ce désespoir à nul autre égal

D’apprivoiser, avec des mots de France,

Ce coeur qui m’est venu du Sénégal?

The meaning is more complicated if we think that Laleau’s Africa, like

that of negritude, came to be a substitutive illusion for the European illusion,

or, rather, an invention, in an effort to construct Caribbean identity from com-

ponents of African origin, participants in a syncretic culture.5 These com-

ponents were used to confront the Francophilia imposed by colonial domi-

nation, establishing a difference from the subaltern non-Western side. Of

course, the invention is not enacted from the outside: It comes from a trans-

atlantic Africanicity lived and transfigured as an active factor of Caribbean

cultures. Laleau imagines an Africa as part of the West, although conflictual

and subaltern.

In any case, the attitude of the poem is passive, allowing French

to domesticate difference. Beginning in the late thirties, writers of negri-

tude, especially Aimé Césaire, were concerned with forcing the European

language to culturally express a hybrid context, where very active non-

European ingredients could participate—those from Africa and Asia as

well as those resulting from the transformations of European cultures in

America. Césaire said that he had wanted ‘‘to make an Antillian French, a

black French that, while remaining French, would bear the black mark.’’ 6 This

decolonizing operation gives a communicable voice to the excluded and to

difference.

Shortly before Césaire, in the same epoch, Nicolás Guillén, of Cuba,

introduced rhythms, intonations, sonorities, and airs of African ancestry into

classic Spanish. Some of his poems, according to Alfred Melon and Deside-

rio Navarro, possess a phonic texture characteristic of Yoruba, Kikongo, Efik,

and other African languages. Navarro concludes that ‘‘by speaking Spanish,

the poet is also speaking in a black-African language.’’ 7 Already the tonal

5. See Jean Bernabé, Patrick Charnoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, Éloge de la Creolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 20.

6. Aimé Césaire, interviewed by René Depestre, in his introduction to Césaire, Poemas

(Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1969), xx.7. Alfred Melon-Degras, ‘‘Guillén: poeta de la síntesis,’’ in his Realidad, poesía e ideología (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1973), 25–61; Desiderio Navarro, ‘‘Sonido y sentido en Nicolás

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

173

of

265

boundary 2



8/11


character of the Bantú and Sudanese languages influences the manner in

which we Cubans pronounce and intonate Spanish.This phonic synthesis participates in the ideology of cultural mesti-

zaje that lays the foundation for the idea of a Cuban national identity thatGuillén’s poetry helps to construct:

We are together from far away,

young, old,

blacks and whites, all mixed;

one ruling, the other ruled,

all mixed

Estamos juntos desde muy lejos,

jóvenes, viejos,

negros y blancos, todo mezclado;

uno mandando y otro mandado,

todo mezclado

This position coincides with that of the ethnologist Fernando Ortiz,

who compared Cuban identity to ajiaco —a stew of very diverse ingredients,in which the broth that results from the mixture represents an integrated

nationality, a synthesis.8 The problem with the idea of cultural mestizaje isthat it can be used to create the image of a fair and harmonious fusion, dis-

guising not only differences but also contradictions and flagrant inequalities

under the myth of an integrated nation. This is the problem with all notions

based on synthesis, which tends to erase imbalances and conflicts. What

remains to be seen is which ingredients each puts into the ajiaco and whogets the largest serving. Moreover, it is necessary to emphasize that, apart

from the broth of synthesis, there remain bones and hard meat that never

dissolve, although they support the substance of the broth. The paradigm

of the ajiaco , as it refers to hybridization, would have to be complementedwith that of ‘‘moros con cristianos’’ (‘‘Moors with Christians’’), a Cuban dish

of rice and black beans cooked together, as a symbol of multiculturalism.9

Both interconnect: They must be eaten together. And to drink? Perhaps

Coca Cola. . . .

Guillén,’’ in his Ejercicios del criterio (Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba,1988), 11–32.

8. Fernando Ortiz, ‘‘Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,’’ in Orbita de Fernando Ortiz

(Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1973), 154–57.

9. SeeGerardo Mosquera, ‘‘Africa in the Art of Latin America,’’ Art Journal 51, no. 4 (winter1992): 30–38.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

174

of

265

boundary 2



9/11


Another difficulty is that the model of hybridization leads to thinking

about intercultural processes as a mathematical equation, a division andsum of elements, the result of which is a tertium quid, the outcome of the

mix. This kind of model obscures cultural creation, which is not necessarily

the fruit of the blend but rather an invention or a specific use of a foreign

element.

To force French and Spanish to speak African is, in reality, to

empower them, enrich them, make them capable of communicating other

meanings corresponding to other experiences, often marginal. But here

again there is ambivalence, because the European languages come out

winning. These achievements are appropriated by hegemonic circuits and

can be used, as anthropology was, to make the tools of domination more

sophisticated. Such are the disjunctions in which cultural power is settled

today. Beyond, there is French that ceases to be French, when it is trans-

formed into the numerous Creole languages of the Caribbean. But French

assures writers an international diffusion, which is very important in areas

where very few people are able to read. The high level of illiteracy in coun-

tries such as Haiti forces writers to produce for export.

If Laleau experienced the European language as a ball and chain,

and Césaire and Guillén proposed to transform it, there are other instances

in which there is little anxiety over its use from a position of alterity. The Con-

golese intellectual Théophile Obenga proclaimed, at the beginning of the

sixties, in his poem ‘‘Tu parleras,’’ dedicated to Césaire:

the words are their words

but the song is ours.

les mots sont leurs mots

mais le chant est nôtre

This position eliminates the conflicts over the origin of the cultural

instrument and stresses instead its use. But it maintains a separation

between foreign language and one’s own. Today, a dialogic relationship in

which the imposed language and culture are experienced as ‘‘own-alien,’’ as

Mikhail Bakhtin states in his discussion of literary polyglossia, seems more

plausible.10 Hegemonic cultural elements are not only imposed but are also

assumed, reversing the schema of power by the appropriation of the instru-

10. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘‘De la prehistoria de la palabra de la novela,’’ in his Problemas literarios y estéticos , trans. Alfredo Caballero (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1986),490–91.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

175

of

265

boundary 2



10/11


ments of domination.11 In this way, for example, the syncretism in America

of African deities with Catholic saints and virgins, practiced by slaves whowere forced to Christianize, was not only a strategy to disguise the African

gods behind the Christian icons: It implied the installation of all of them at

once in a new inclusive system.

All cultures always feed on one another, be it in situations of domi-

nation or subordination. Conscious and selective antropofágia , or culturalcannibalism (in other words, the critical assimilation of foreign elements

to incorporate them into one’s own organism), proclaimed by the Brazilian

modernists in the twenties, has been a constant of Latin American modern-

isms. Antropofágia as a program is not as fluid as it seems, since it is notcarried out in a neutral territory but rather in one that is subordinated, with

an aesthetic practice that tacitly assumes the contradictions of dependence

and the postcolonial situation. In the end, who eats whom?

The flow of culture cannot always remain circulating in the same

North-South direction, fixed by the structure of global power, its circuits

of diffusion, and the local accommodations to these. However plausible

appropriating and transculturating strategies may be, they imply an action

of rebound that reproduces the hegemonic structures, even as it contests

them. It is also necessary to invert the flow—not by turning it into a binary

schema of transference, defying power, but by endeavoring to pluralize by

enriching circulation in a truly global direction.

In her poem ‘‘Not Neither,’’ the Nuyorrican poet Sandra María Estévez

oscillates between languages and identities, constructing a ‘‘de-alienating’’

option that operates through the displacements between disjunction and

affirmation proper to this dynamic:

being Puertorriqueña bien But yet, not gringa either, Pero ni

portorra, pero sí portorra too Pero ni que what am I? . . .

Yet not being, pero soy, and not really Y somos, y como

somos Bueno, eso sí es algo lindo Algo muy lindo.12

This poem is untranslatable. Furthermore, it underscores the very

paradoxes endemic to translation. But it also involves a statement in favor

of bilingualism and biculturalism. The key word in the poem is precisely the

untranslatable one: portorra , a termfor Puerto Rican / Puertorriqueña , which

11. Ticio Escobar, El mito del arte y el mito del pueblo: cuestiones sobre arte popular

(Asunción, Paraguay: R. Peroni Ediciones, 1987), 76.12. Sandra María Estéves, Yerba Buena: dibujos y poemas (Greenfield Center, N.Y.:Greenfield Review Press, 1980).

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

176

of

265

boundary 2



11/11


is simultaneously deprecatory and affectionate. Estévez subscribes to and

simultaneously unsettles Bakhtin’s ‘‘own-alien’’ notion, turning it around toemphasize the ‘‘alien-own.’’

We are living in the Era of the Hyphen: The proliferation of prefixes

and hyphens highlights the difficulties of inherited language for describing

contemporary nonrevolutions. Rather than invent new terms, the existing

ones are combined and recycled, in a spirit of readaptation, with meaning

concentrated less in words than in the connecting dialogical, transfiguring

space of the hyphen. But this also represents an interaction originating from

within the rupture: The hyphen unites at the same time as it separates. In

a fascinating book, Gustavo Pérez Firmat has gone so far as to summarize

the Cuban American condition as a ‘‘life on the hyphen.’’

3

I will end with two open-ended metaphors, one optimistic and the

other pessimistic. You can choose the one you prefer as a conclusion.

First, the optimistic one. Upon their arrival in America, the Spaniards were

obsessed for years with knowing whether they were on an island or a main-

land. A historian from the nineteenth century, a priest from the Cuban village

of Los Palacios, tells us that when Columbus asked the indigenous people

of Cuba whether that place was an island or a continent, they answered

him by saying that it was ‘‘an infinite land of which no one had seen the

end, although it was an island.’’ 13 Perhaps today’s currents point us toward

a globe of infinite islands.

The other metaphor might be useful to discuss the issues of glob-

alization, difference, and power. The following anecdote was told to me by

the Cuban painter Julio Girona, who settled in New York City in the thirties.

Once, in the early sixties, he happened to be crossing a street where people

were marching in a political demonstration. The police attacked, and amidst

the chaos, a cop approached Girona violently. ‘‘Nigger, get out of here!’’ the

policeman barked. Surprised, Girona answered: ‘‘I’m not a nigger.’’ ‘‘Okay,

but go away, you dirty Portorican !’’ replied the cop, threatening him with hisclub. ‘‘I’m not Portorican : I’m a Cuban!’’ the artist pointed out. But the police-man ended the debate beating him, while saying, ‘‘It’s all the same shit!’’

13. Andrés Bernaldes, ‘‘Historia de los Reyes Católicos,’’ in Memorias de la Real Socie-

dad Patriótica de La Habana , vol. 3 (Havana: n.p., 1837), 128. Quoted by Cintio Vitier andFina García Marruz, Flor oculta de poesía cubana (siglos XVIII y XIX) (Havana: EditorialArte y Literatura, 1978), 63.

Tseng 2002.9.12 07:31

6736 boundary

2

29:3 / sheet

177

of

265

boundary 2

alien-own/own-alien: globalization and cultural difference

Documents