Chapter 4 - Conjuring at the Margins: A Transcontinental Approach to Interpreting Border Art

Summary

The subaltern creativity that directs border thinking may be said to begin “from a point of breakage”—a point from which, unrectified potentials, and the symbols of the unconscious, can assert themselves over or against unifying ideologies, “fictive ethnicities,” or arbitrary, standardized expectations (Keating 2012: 11; Merçon 2014). In the freedom space created by the breakage, border artists often surprisingly access dimensions of the “whole self” that are suppressed or simply lost and unknown in more mainstream cultural contexts. Although artists’ border thinking may begin from a place of difference and distinction, their creative work often awakens a mediating intelligence that can potentially support more differentiated integrations as it challenges false universals.

In his opening essay in this volume, Ananta Kumar Giri helpfully distinguishes Mrinal Miri's approach to the subject of margins (2003) from that of Noel Parker (2009). The contrast between the two perspectives, and their possible complementarity, is useful for framing my arguments regarding the nature of subaltern creativity and the artist's border-crossing intelligence. As Giri explains, Miri views “the limits of discourse of margins” as a product of mainstream discourse and thus something that leaves the individual and society subject to a “point of breakage” because they are positioned “in the context of a pervasive and hierarchical dualism between margins and mainstreams.” Parker's work, however, which is based in part upon Deleuzian philosophy, affirms the liminal nature of marginality as “integral to any condition of life,” noting that the is-and-is not, in-between position can be particularly helpful in negotiating identities and differences.

This chapter considers the possibility of negotiating between these two positions: it applies an oscillating approach that engages both the limits and the possibilities of margins and their discourses. I develop the oscillating strategy by exploring culture itself as a holistic reality, and by distinguishing margin-mainstream dualisms from the inner conflicts and hierarchies that beset in-group members within a given marginalized group. While conceptualizing culture as the totality of all things may enrich our appreciation of Parker's view, the complex tension existing between margin and mainstream dualisms and in-group conflicts generates what Theophus Smith calls a “double-sidedness” that brings to the fore Miri's point regarding the limits of discourse of margins.